THE WAR

The United States and Israel go to war with Iran, kill its supreme leader, and set the Gulf on fire

In the early hours of 28 February a combined American and Israeli force struck Iran with nearly nine hundred strikes in twelve hours, killing Ali Khamenei and much of the state's military leadership. Within days the retaliation had reached across the whole Gulf: an American carrier hit, US bases struck in Qatar and Bahrain, Saudi oil in flames, and a region tipping into the largest war it has known in a generation.

The war so many watched being assembled began, as such wars do, in the dark. In the early hours of 28 February the United States and Israel launched a combined assault on Iran, nearly nine hundred strikes in the first twelve hours, and by the time the sun rose the supreme leader Ali Khamenei was dead, killed in his Tehran compound, along with a swathe of the state's senior military command. The declared aim, sold for months as the prevention of an Iranian nuclear weapon, revealed itself in the first night to be something larger and older: the decapitation of a state, the destruction of its capacity to resist, and, increasingly openly, the ending of its regime. By 3 March the Iranian Red Crescent counted at least 787 dead and thousands wounded, and those were only the numbers anyone could yet count.

Iran, cornered and leaderless at the top but far from destroyed, struck back across the entire region, and it was the breadth of the retaliation that turned a bombing campaign into a war. Iranian missiles hit the American carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, killing three US service members, and struck the vast Al Udeid air base in Qatar and a hotel in Bahrain housing American embassy staff; a ballistic missile killed nine at a synagogue in Beit Shemesh in Israel; Saudi Aramco's Ras Tanura refinery was set ablaze; drones reached Cyprus, Kuwait, the UAE. Hezbollah opened the Lebanese front and Israeli ground forces crossed into the south. American and Kuwaiti forces, in the fog of it, shot down three American fighter jets by mistake. This was no longer a strike and a calibrated response, the pattern of 2024; it was a general war across the Gulf, with a fifth of the world's oil at its mercy, and no one able to say where its edges were or when it would end.

THE SHOCKWAVE

Oil erupts, the Strait closes, and the war reaches every economy on earth

The war did what a war in the Gulf always threatens to do and the world had spent two years pretending it would not: it broke the oil market. Crude surged roughly two-thirds in little over a week, from the high sixties to above one hundred and thirteen dollars, as Iran menaced the Strait of Hormuz through which a fifth of the world's petroleum flows and shippers fled it, Maersk suspending transits, QatarEnergy halting LNG production, tankers turning back. The shock radiated outward in hours, into fuel prices and freight rates and the calculations of every central bank, and an economy that had spent three years leaning its growth on an artificial-intelligence build-out now faced the oldest kind of disruption, a war over oil, arriving to test whether the digital future could survive a very physical past. Markets did not crash; they shuddered, and began, warily, to price a world at war.

IN BRIEF

The streets, the Senate, the bomb

Americans filled the streets of their own cities in protest against a war their government had launched without their consent, the largest antiwar demonstrations in a generation, even as the Senate rejected a War Powers Resolution that would have limited the president's authority to wage it. In Europe, the war's nuclear logic landed fast: President Macron announced the first increase in France's nuclear stockpile in decades, and France and Denmark reached a deterrence agreement, as a continent that had outsourced its security began, in fear, to arm. And in Tehran, amid the rubble, the machinery of succession turned: Mojtaba Khamenei, the dead leader's son, moved to inherit the office his father's killers had just emptied.

The Column

The strong do what they can

For a quarter of a century the empire lied about why it went to war. This time it barely troubled to. This is about the honesty of this war, and about the one thing the weak have ever had against the strong, which is not power but memory.

By Zainab Zaheer

Twenty-four centuries ago the historian Thucydides recorded a conversation between the envoys of imperial Athens and the leaders of the small island of Melos, which wished only to stay neutral in a war not its own. The Athenians did not bother with pretext. They did not claim to be liberating the Melians or protecting anyone or spreading any civilisation. They said, with a candour that has shocked and clarified readers ever since, that questions of justice arise only between equals in power, and that in the world as it actually is, the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. The Melians appealed to justice, to the gods, to hope. The Athenians told them hope was the comfort of the desperate, besieged the island, and when it fell put the men to death and sold the women and children into slavery. I have been thinking about Melos this fortnight, because I have just watched the Athenian speech delivered again, in the language of our own age, over my part of the world.

For twenty-five years the empire that bombs my region has draped its wars in the language of principle, and I have spent this paper's pages arguing that the hypocrisy, murderous as it was, at least conceded that principle had power, that the liar admitted a standard he felt obliged to honour. This war has stripped even that away. The nuclear pretext, thin from the start, dissolved in the first night into the decapitation of a state and the open talk of ending a regime, and what remains, once you clear away the vanishing justifications, is the Melian dialogue in its purest modern form: Iran was struck not because a case was proven but because Iran was weak enough, and isolated enough, and the moment ripe enough, that the strong could, and so the strong did. This is the honest doctrine that has governed the treatment of the weak all along, spoken now almost without embarrassment, and I want to be clear that its honesty is not its virtue but its horror, because a power that has stopped even pretending justice applies to the weak has announced that the weak have no protection but their strength, which is precisely what they lack.

Let me give the war's defenders their strongest ground, because I have never wanted to win this argument cheaply and I will not start now. Iran's regime was a genuine tyranny, a jailer and killer of its own people, and it was, by many serious accounts, advancing toward a weapon that a state which chants for the destruction of others should not possess; the case that a nuclear-armed theocracy was an intolerable danger is not a fabrication, and the people making it are not all cynics. I hold all of that, as I have held it before. But the Melian point survives every word of it, because the question was never whether Iran was dangerous; it was whether the annihilation of the weak by the strong, however justified in the language of threat, produces anything but more of what it claims to prevent. The Athenians were not wrong that they were stronger. They were wrong that strength was the same as safety, and Athens, which taught the world that the strong do what they can, lost its own catastrophic war within a generation, undone in no small part by the arrogance that Melos had rehearsed. Strength that mistakes itself for permission writes, in the act of its exercise, the terms of its own eventual ruin.

And here is the turn, the one thing I have to offer against a despair that would otherwise be total. We remember Melos. Twenty-four centuries later, an obscure island that submitted to nothing and won nothing and was erased for it is remembered, its name a byword for exactly this crime, and it is remembered for a single reason: because Thucydides wrote down what was done to it, and refused to let the annihilation of the weak pass into the silence that the strong prefer. That refusal, the recording, is the only power the weak have ever had against the strong, and it is not nothing, because it is the reason we can say, of the Athenians, that they were monstrous, a judgment their power could not prevent and their victory could not erase. The strong do what they can, and this fortnight they did it, to a nation of ninety million, over the oil, with the supreme leader dead and the cities burning and the world's attention already drifting to the price of petrol. I cannot stop it; no one writing anything can stop it. But I can do the Melian thing, the only thing, which is to write it down, plainly, as it happened, so that when the strong have finished telling the story as a triumph, there remains an account that calls it what it was, and outlives them, as Melos outlived Athens, in the one court that power has never learned to conquer, which is the memory of what was actually done.

The Ledger

The oil shock is the first serious external test of the AI build-out this paper has tracked for three years: a war-driven doubling of energy costs strikes directly at the economics of data centres and the growth story leaning on them. The $690 billion bet now faces a physical world it spent three years abstracting away.

Data centers & power

Energy has moved from the substrate of the AI race to the front line of a war; the same physical foundation this paper kept insisting was the real constraint is now being reshaped, violently, by a conflict over the oil beneath it.

Rates

The oil shock is a supply shock, the one kind of inflation a central bank cannot fix, and it arrives on top of tariffs into an economy already slowing; recession models jump, and the Fed confronts a price spike its tools can only worsen or ignore.

Real estate

US 30-year mortgage jumps toward 6.5 percent on the inflation shock; the strange calm of the domestic market finally breaks against a war it cannot stay insulated from.

India tech

India, dependent on Gulf oil and home to millions of workers across the region, is struck directly by the war: energy costs surge, remittances are threatened, and its careful non-alignment faces its hardest test as the world divides over a conflict on its doorstep.

What we called wrong

Nothing to retract, and no satisfaction in it. This paper tracked the Iran confrontation from the strikes of 2024 through the naval clashes of January to the fleet of February, and warned, in the last edition before the bombs, that the war would produce not safety but its opposite. The warning was not heeded. It is now the record.

The Back Page

The streets that could not stop it

While the missiles crossed the Gulf, Americans filled their own streets against the war their government had launched in their name and without their leave, the largest antiwar demonstrations this paper has seen in its run, and there is something in the sight worth holding, even knowing what it could not do. It could not stop the war; the Senate declined even to limit it, and the bombs fell regardless of the crowds. The easy lesson is futility, that the people marched and the state ignored them and the machine ground on, and the easy lesson is not wrong. But there is a harder one beside it. A country in which no one marched, in which a war of this magnitude was launched to silence and consent, would be a country that had surrendered something the marching, however impotent, refuses to surrender: the record that not everyone agreed, that the war was done over objection, that a portion of the people saw it clearly and said so while it was happening. The crowds did not stop the war. They did the smaller, stubborner thing that is sometimes all that is available, the thing this whole paper is finally about: they made sure that when the history is written, it cannot say the country was united behind it, because it was not, and the streets, for a few cold days in a terrible fortnight, made the disagreement impossible to erase.