August 2, 2026 — 3:30pm
President Donald Trump has lost control of the war against Iran. If there was any doubt, that was dispelled on Sunday when the US State Department urged Americans across the Middle East to leave the region, or to prepare to leave at short notice, after both Trump and Iran rapidly escalated their threats.
Trump’s war with Iran has now metastasised into a conflict that is consuming the entire region. With drone strikes against two vessels in the Egyptian Mediterranean port of Damietta on Wednesday, Egypt now joins the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan, Iraq and Israel as targets of Iranian, or Iranian-aligned groups. Saudi and US aircraft have also bombed targets in Iraq, and Saudi Arabia has engaged targets in Yemen, while the Houthi movement threatens freedom of navigation in Bab al-Mandab, the southern transit point for the Red Sea.
It seems an eternity ago when Trump spoke of a still undisclosed “imminent threat” posed by Iran, that it would never possess a nuclear weapon, that the US would destroy Iran’s missiles and “raze its missile industry to the ground”, annihilate its navy and ensure terrorist proxies could no longer destabilise the region. He also called on the Iranian people to take over their government because America was backing them with “overwhelming strength and devastating force”. At the time, he stated that his administration had projected that the operation would take four to five weeks. We are now into the sixth month of a conflict with no obvious end point.
