The Two-Front War

The Two-Front War

We spent a few days in the field, and the war did not wait. A naval blockade now rings Iran’s coast, the IRGC has published its extortion doctrine in a single sentence, and the Church of England voted to give a manifesto that calls Jewish self-determination “settler colonialism” a respectful hearing. The missiles aim at hulls. The manifestos aim at minds. This briefing covers both fronts.

Good morning. The Insider has been out of the office for a few days, in the field, and we are back at the desk with the full picture. It needs two maps. On the first: the United States has placed Iran’s entire coastline under naval blockade, enforced since Tuesday afternoon, after Tehran answered a week of strikes by declaring the Strait of Hormuz closed “until further notice” and putting cruise missiles into two Emirati supertankers. On the second: the General Synod of the Church of England voted this week to “hear” Kairos II, a document that brands Israel “settler colonialism”; Britain finally outlawed support for the IRGC; and the lawfare front’s chief prosecutor saw his suspension upheld by his own bar.

These are not two stories. They are one war fought with two arsenals, ballistic missiles in the Gulf and ideological subversion in the capitals of the West, and the second front accelerated precisely while the first went kinetic. The Forum fights on both, and this issue closes with the new Forum paper proving the cognitive front runs on a supply line 1,300 years old.

Gregg Roman · July 16, 2026

In this morning’s brief:

• The strait under blockade: the siege, the toll that wasn’t, and the tanker toll
• The reply and the second chokepoint: three partners under fire, Bab el-Mandeb warming
• The Levant ledger: Rome, Jabalia, the Syria wager, and an October ballot
• The ideological front: the Synod, the prosecutor, and the proscription
• Special Feature: the oldest weapon on the battlefield is a tax

The week Washington stopped escorting and started sealing.

The pivot came Saturday. With Muscat hosting talks on reopening both Hormuz lanes, the IRGC instead fired on the Cyprus-flagged container ship GFS Galaxy, whose crew, eleven of them Indian, abandoned ship, one Indian engineer killed, and declared that “the Strait of Hormuz will be closed until further notice and until the end of the American interventions in this area” (Axios). CENTCOM’s answer has run every night since: roughly 140 targets Saturday, dozens more Sunday including the first combat use of one-way attack sea drones against a naval maintenance facility, a five-hour wave Monday against sites at Bushehr, Chabahar, Jask, Konarak, Abu Musa, and Bandar Abbas, a seven-hour operation Tuesday against coastal targets, and another round Wednesday, with air-defense fire reported over parts of Tehran overnight into this morning (CNN, CENTCOM, The Hill, Iran International). Iran’s counter was aimed at commerce: early Tuesday, cruise missiles struck two ADNOC supertankers, Mombasa B and Al Bahyah, inside Omani waters on the southern route, killing an Indian seafarer and wounding eight more; the UAE called it a “blatant attack” and asserted its “full right to respond,” and India summoned Iran’s deputy ambassador (Reuters). CENTCOM commander Adm. Brad Cooper’s tally: seven commercial vessels attacked in a week, roughly a dozen mariners dead, missing, or hurt, and a regime targeting civilians “intentionally” (CNBC).

So Washington changed the mission. On Monday the President announced the blockade’s return along with a fee: the United States as “THE GUARDIAN OF THE HORMUZ STRAIT,” to be “reimbursed, at the rate of 20% on all cargo shipped” as “a matter of FAIRNESS” (Times of Israel). By Tuesday, after “highly productive conversations with Middle East leadership,” the fee was gone, replaced by “Trade and Investment Deals that the various Gulf States will be making into the United States,” while the blockade itself went into force: JMIC Advisory 015-26 announces enforcement, from 4:00 pm ET July 14, of “a naval blockade of all Iranian ports and Iranian coastal areas,” applying “to all vessel traffic, regardless of flag,” any runner “subject to interception” (JMIC, Axios, Washington Times). Roughly twenty warships are enforcing it, and the Navy turned away its first two Iran-bound cargo ships Wednesday (IranWire). Trump’s own summary: the strait is open “to ALL Ship traffic except for Iran.”

The market’s verdict is escalation priced soberly, not panic: oil rose about 12 percent from Friday through Tuesday, Brent settled near $85 Wednesday with WTI at $79.60, US crude pushed back above $80 in Asian trading this morning for a fourth straight session of gains, strait tanker traffic sits at a five-week low, and war-risk premiums are expected to rise sharply (Bloomberg, OilPrice, CNBC). MST Marquee’s Saul Kavonic: “Oil could retest $100 if the current intensity of hostilities persist for a few weeks.” The Forum’s frame for the week comes from Lazar Berman: Iran “continues to escalate, declaring Hormuz totally closed and targeting Bahrain, Jordan and two tankers associated with the United Arab Emirates early Tuesday alone,” because the regime’s priority is flexing muscle on Hormuz, not dealing with Trump (MEF / Berman). His honest caution belongs in the record too: the regime judges its “regional position is stronger than it was before the war.” Shay Khatiri’s answer in the Forum’s pages is territorial: to win, “the United States must seize Qeshm Island” (MEF / Khatiri).

The blockade is the Hormuz Mandate translated into naval English, and it is the first policy of this war that matches the regime’s own theory of the strait: control, not access, is the currency. Note the one wobble, because Tehran did: a toll on the world’s shipping lasted about thirty hours, priced by the coalition as extortion-with-better-branding, and the correction from fee to investment is the Reciprocity Standard working on us as well as on them. Guardianship is a duty you charge to the enemy, not the customer. The scoreboard has not moved: 138 daily transits before the war, a fraction now. A sealed Iranian coast is the means. That number is the end.

Iran’s answer to a blockade of its coast: fire on everyone else’s.

The pattern held through Wednesday: hit the neighbors, spare the introspection. Jordan’s air defenses intercepted four ballistic missiles early Tuesday and three more early Wednesday, with engineering teams clearing debris and no casualties reported (Petra). Kuwait’s General Staff counted one ballistic missile, five cruise missiles, and thirty-three drones engaged Tuesday evening; falling debris did damage, and a Kuwaiti Navy vessel was hit, injuring four sailors (Gulf News, Iran International). Bahrain reportedly took Iran’s first cluster-munition attack on the kingdom, aimed at Sheikh Isa Air Base, per ISW’s July 14 update, a claim Manama has not confirmed (ISW), and the IRGC claimed fresh Wednesday strikes, including on a US logistics center at Kuwait’s Mina Abdulla. Then the regime published the doctrine behind it all, in an IRGC statement carried by IRNA Wednesday morning: “Regional energy exports are either shared by all, or denied to all,” alongside a threat to close “all other export corridors that benefit the U.S. and its allies” (Reuters via Oman Observer, IranWire).

“All other corridors” has an address. Analysts read the line as Tehran signaling it may direct the Houthis to close Bab el-Mandeb, opening a second chokepoint against the same customers (Reuters); CTP has tracked senior regime figures, Khamenei-era military adviser Yahya Rahim Safavi among them, threatening exactly that pairing (ISW/CTP). The Yemen front is already warming. On Monday the internationally recognized government bombed Sanaa airport’s runway to stop an Iranian Mahan Air flight carrying a Houthi delegation home from Khamenei’s funeral; Vice President Abdullah al-Alimi said such flights carried “equipment for the Houthi movement,” which has “transformed from merely a domestic threat into a regional and international threat” (Guardian). The Houthis answered with missiles at Saudi Arabia, breaking a four-year truce, and a political bureau member promised, via Iranian state media, that Bab el-Mandeb and Hormuz would close “in an operational alliance,” sending oil, they promised, as high as $200 a barrel (Reuters via Livemint). Riyadh’s reward for three years of reconciliation with Tehran keeps arriving by air. The Forum’s Hussein Aboubakr Mansour supplies the uncomfortable read: Saudi Arabia has arrived at a strategic assessment that “treats both Iran and Israel as equally revisionist actors,” and the old assumption that its accession to the Accords was merely a matter of timing and terms has collapsed (MEF / Mansour).

Maritime disorder is globalizing on the same clock. Tuesday night into Wednesday, Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces said drones struck twenty Russian shadow-fleet vessels in the Black Sea, seventeen of them tankers, opening the naval phase of an operation that hit 116 vessels in the Sea of Azov over the prior nine days (Kyiv Independent, Reuters via MarineLink; a Ukrainian claim, not yet independently verified). Two of the world’s three great maritime pressure points are now active in the same week. Inside Iran, the regime mourns and rations: Saeid Golkar writes that the state is “trying to convert his death into a staged affirmation of authority, legitimacy, and transnational Shia leadership” (MEF / Golkar), while Potkin Azarmehr documents southern cities facing 122-degree heat and blackouts as state media headlines vengeance (MEF / Azarmehr), and Jim Hanson surveys the signs of internal dissent (MEF / Hanson).

Accords Logic is being stress-tested exactly as designed: a regime that cannot win recognition of its toll booth is making neutrality more expensive than alignment, one salvo into Amman, Kuwait City, and Manama at a time. Mansour’s warning deserves a straight answer rather than a wince: Riyadh’s equidistance is what hedging looks like when American staying power is the open question, and the cure is not courtship, it is victory. As for Wednesday’s doctrine, shared by all or denied to all is not a bargaining position; it is a confession that the regime’s only remaining regional offer is hostage-taking with better production values. Two chokepoints, one doctrine. The answer is one coalition, two theaters, and a blockade that outlasts the tantrum.

Rome talks, a Jabalia elimination, the Syria wager, and a date with the ballot box.

Round six ran Tuesday and Wednesday at the US Embassy in Rome, the first talks since the June framework, with Israel’s delegation under Ambassador Yechiel Leiter and Lebanon’s under Ambassador Simon Karam. A State Department official called day one “productive and held in a positive atmosphere”; Foreign Minister Sa’ar said implementing the framework is “the only way forward,” with Israel “ready to move forward implementing these two pilot zones” (Reuters, AFP via Al-Monitor). The round concluded Wednesday evening with an announced first product: “We agreed on the structure and guidelines for the pilot zone process, to be finalised and implemented in the coming days,” per a US official, with Israeli reporting that an IDF pullback from the zones could begin within days (Reuters via US News, JPost). The ground, as of this morning, remains where it was: no IDF withdrawal, no LAF deployment, no disarmament. President Aoun instructed his delegation to demand the “immediate start” of Israeli withdrawal “before any other discussion,” while Hezbollah’s position remains Naim Qassem’s from May: “Disarmament is extermination” (Times of Israel, JPost). The Long War Journal states the structural problem plainly: the framework “requires Lebanon to do what it remains unable or unwilling to do: restrain and disarm Hezbollah” (LWJ). Jonathan Spyer, reporting from Beaufort Castle and in the Wall Street Journal, carries the IDF’s operating rule from an officer on the line: “Until we see signs of the Lebanese Army coming to disarm them, we’re keeping the knife to Hezbollah’s neck” (MEF / Spyer, Beaufort dispatch).

In Gaza, the methodical work continued. On Tuesday the IDF “struck in the northern Gaza Strip and eliminated the terrorist Mohammed Marwan Mohammed Salem, the Head of Military Security of Hamas’ Central Jabaliya Battalion,” along with a Nukhba operative who headed the Hamas police investigations department and two other operatives, with “precise munitions and aerial surveillance” used to mitigate civilian harm (IDF via INN); the Hamas-run interior ministry cast Salem as a local police colonel (BBC). The diplomatic track grinds toward the Security Council’s quarterly Middle East debate later this month, where the Board of Peace’s first report has already done the honest accounting: it names “Hamas’ refusal to accept verified decommissioning, relinquish coercive control, and permit a genuine civilian transition in Gaza” as the “principal obstacle to full implementation” of the ceasefire (S/2026/418 via AP, SCR). The bill attached to that transition is now official: $71.4 billion over a decade, per the EU-UN-World Bank assessment (UN). Watch where that money tries to flow; the Forum’s Islamist Watch has spent two decades documenting the “charity” networks that treat reconstruction as revenue. Israel, meanwhile, hardened two facts on the ground and one on the calendar: the security cabinet’s 1.3 billion shekel budget for 34 new settlements, detailed Tuesday, which Smotrich called “historic” and a program for “killing the idea of establishing a terrorist state in the heart of the country” (Reuters, JPost), a move most governments deem illegal under international law (Reuters); and an election date, October 27, with this Knesset set to become the first since 1988 to serve its full term, and polls, per Reuters, currently pointing against the incumbent (Times of Israel). Every Gaza and Lebanon decision between now and October is now also a campaign decision.

The week’s biggest wager sits in Damascus. Trump formally notified Congress on July 8 of his intent to rescind Syria’s State Sponsor of Terrorism designation, a 45-day review making de-listing effective around August 22; Rubio called it “yet another historic step” (Reuters). The Forum’s Sirwan Kajjo published the counter-brief Wednesday: Syria remains “home to thousands of foreign jihadist fighters, many of whom have been integrated into the country’s new military structure,” January’s al-Hol collapse freed thousands, and “it would be wiser for the Trump administration to delay removing Syria from the State Sponsors of Terrorism list until the country’s political transition demonstrates greater durability” (MEF / Kajjo). Amine Ayoub’s companion warning: “Islamist organizations utilize tactical moderation to achieve international legitimacy before consolidating absolute power” (MEF / Ayoub). The smuggling map argues for their caution: Hezbollah’s post-Assad supply lines through Syria have gone “fragmented and decentralized,” with “smaller, more frequent shipments” that are harder to interdict, even as Damascus has seized more than a dozen Hezbollah-bound shipments since the fall of the regime (This Is Beirut, Washington Institute). Sudan, meanwhile, drew the institutional West’s signature product: the G7 foreign ministers and the EU’s high representative on Tuesday urged the RSF to “immediately cease any action likely to lead to further atrocities or endanger civilians in El-Obeid,” where ten days of June drone strikes killed at least fifty civilians and half a million people are at risk (Reuters, EEAS). A statement, set against a siege.

The Post-Aid Alliance ledger prices Rome at exactly what happens in the pilot zones and not a euro more: withdrawal follows verified disarmament, never precedes it, and Aoun’s “withdrawal first” is a request to reverse that sequence with better manners. Wednesday’s “structure and guidelines” get graded the same way: paper, until a zone changes hands under verification. On Syria, apply the Carthage rule to paperwork: leverage surrendered before benchmarks is leverage donated, and de-listing on a calendar rather than on Kajjo’s benchmarks is a wager that a jihadist payroll becomes a state before the state becomes a jihadist payroll. And the $71.4 billion is not a reconstruction budget until the decommissioning line in the Board of Peace’s own report is satisfied; until then it is a bid book for the extortion economy, and Washington should say so at the quarterly debate.

The Synod, the prosecutor, the proscription, and the networks between them.

Start in York. On July 13 the General Synod of the Church of England carried a Carlisle diocesan motion, Bishops 25-0 with five abstentions, Clergy 115-20, Laity 113-27, committing the Church to “hear the Kairos Palestine Declaration (2009), the Cry for Hope (2020), the Call for Repentance (2023) and Kairos Palestine II (2025) as heartfelt expressions of the lived experience of Palestinian Christians,” to encourage engagement with them “at all levels,” and to review church investments in light of the ICJ’s 2024 advisory opinion (Church of England, The JC, Church Times). An amendment softened the original “receive” to “hear”; the Methodist Conference, days earlier, went further and received Kairos II outright. What the Synod agreed to platform is not ambiguous. Kairos II, issued in November 2025 as “A Moment of Truth: Faith in a Time of Genocide,” demands that the churches of the world “repudiate Zionist theology and... state clearly their position on Palestine: this is a case of settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing of an indigenous people,” praises boycotts, divestment, and sanctions as an effective form of “creative resistance,” and names Christian Zionism “a theological distortion and a moral corruption” (Kairos II, NGO Monitor). Chief Rabbi Mirvis: “It is shameful that the Church of England General Synod has recommended engagement with Kairos II. This is a document full of falsehood... This is a sad day for Jewish-Christian relations.” Board of Deputies president Phil Rosenberg called its “falsehoods and distortions... a prescription for more division”; Israel’s special envoy George Deek condemned “the shameful decision... to grant legitimacy to the extremist Kairos Palestine document.” Archbishop Sarah Mullally’s defense, that hearing “does not mean we agree with everything in these documents,” concedes the mechanism: the manifesto now travels with the Church’s stamp on the envelope. The Forum’s Jules Gomes covered the capitulation as it happened (MEF / Gomes).

The lawfare front had a worse week in the other direction. Karim Khan, the ICC chief prosecutor whose office sought the warrants against Israel’s leadership, is barred from practice in England and Wales: the Bar Standards Board imposed an immediate interim suspension June 19, and on July 13 a panel ordered it maintained until disciplinary proceedings conclude, this after the UN inquiry into sexual misconduct allegations, a “serious misconduct” finding by the ICC Assembly’s Bureau on June 8, and a removal vote now set for July 24 (Bar Standards Board, AP). Khan “unequivocally denies all allegations of impropriety,” and the suspension is an interim measure, not a finding; the institutional crisis is not interim. In Jerusalem, the High Court of Justice’s May ruling has finished its work: the unanimous decision upheld security vetting for international NGOs and gave de-licensed groups, MSF and Oxfam among them, 30 days to submit staff lists for vetting or cease operations in Gaza and the West Bank; that window closed in mid-June. Justice Gila Canfy-Steinitz: “It is clear that the information requirement serves a clear security purpose” (Times of Israel, JPost). The era of NGOs operating as unvetted diplomatic shields ended not with a decree but with a docket number. And in London, the UK finally moved against the IRGC, by its own bespoke route: regulations laid July 13 designate the IRGC under the National Security Act 2023 as amended by this year’s National Security (State Threats) Act, with support offences carrying up to 14 years and sabotage on its behalf up to life; the Commons approved them Wednesday afternoon, and the Lords take them up today, the last step before they bind (gov.uk, Hansard, BBC). Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood: “Iran and Russia are using proxies and thugs to do their dirty work on our shores.” MI5’s count: at least 20 potentially lethal Iran-linked plots in a year.

The connective tissue is the network layer. Israeli Diaspora Affairs Ministry intelligence reports map Muslim Brotherhood infrastructure in Germany and Italy, with the Europe Trust’s Berlin real estate hub and funding routed through “charitable foundations in Qatar and Kuwait,” and roughly 12,000 people tied to the network in Germany alone (Algemeiner); a leaked German domestic-intelligence briefing describes the Brotherhood’s long-term strategy to “gradually transform social and political decision-making processes” (Bild leak via spiked). Shurat HaDin has asked the US Justice Department to investigate who funds the Brussels-based Hind Rajab Foundation, the outfit filing complaints against Israeli soldiers in more than 24 jurisdictions (Ynet). The European Parliament, at least, has moved this month to bar the Brotherhood’s youth coalition from its activities (MEF / FWI). The retail level runs on the same ideology: at the Islamic House of Wisdom in Dearborn Heights, guest preacher Hassanain Rajabali’s June sermons blamed a Rothschild-built banking system that “controls the entire world,” down to, in his words, “even our minds,” and celebrated Gaza’s fighters as Karbala’s heirs, at the mosque whose imam eulogized Khamenei in March: “How embarrassing, how unfair and heartbreaking to kill a religious leader” (MEF / FWI, Detroit News). And in Canada, the Forum’s Joe Adam George has named the disease: “the persistent unwillingness of political leaders, media institutions, and public officials to discuss the issue honestly” (National Post / MEF).

Call this front what it is, the cognitive front, and stop grading its victories as etiquette problems. A church that votes to “hear” a manifesto branding Jewish statehood settler colonialism has not joined a dialogue; it has enlisted its pulpits as distribution. The counter-battery doctrine is Daylight: the BSB panel, the High Court’s vetting regime, the Commons vote, and the Brussels expulsion all happened because somebody put names, documents, and funding trails on the record until institutions had to choose in public. That is the Forum’s daily trade, from FWI’s sermon transcripts to the Qatar funding files. Deterrence in this theater looks like consequences: prosecutors answerable to their own bar, NGOs answerable to security law, “charities” answerable to FARA and its European cousins, and clergy answerable to their own history, which is precisely the subject of this morning’s special feature.

A new MEF paper dismantles the jizya whitewash. The revisionism it targets is the same method the Synod just agreed to hear.

Published Wednesday, Jalal Tagreeb’s “Confronting the Legacy of Jizya as an Instrument of Subjugation” is the second paper in the Forum’s Dhimmitude Project series, and it lands with the timing of counter-battery radar. Its subject is the concerted effort by Western Islamist academics to reframe the classical jizya, the poll tax imposed on non-Muslims, as a benevolent protection arrangement. Its method is the paper trail: Qur’anic command, classical jurisprudence, and the juridical record. Its conclusion, verbatim: “For thirteen centuries, the jizya stood as a religiously mandated instrument of subjugation... It is not, as some describe it, a reciprocal protection fee.” The apologetic case collapses on its own terms: “A protection fee that disappears the instant one changes religion, and that is textually and ritually entangled with language of abasement, is not functioning primarily as a service charge.” The graduated rates beloved of the whitewashers “did not correct the discriminatory core of the levy, it softened its optics.” And the system’s own actuarial table gives the game away: “a system genuinely organized around reciprocal protection would not simultaneously value the protected party’s life at half that of the protector” (MEF / Tagreeb).

Tagreeb’s larger argument is that the tax was one line item in a wider “architecture of dhimmitude”: the institutional subjugation and humiliation that ground down the indigenous Christian and Jewish communities of the region across centuries. The scholarly record has long carried the receipts for anyone willing to read it: the classical tradition already framed non-Muslim subjects through attitudes of superiority and conditional toleration (Scholar Gateway: Speight 1973, The Muslim World), and the legal sources document how conversion under the dhimma’s fiscal and legal pressure worked in practice (Scholar Gateway: Simonsohn 2013, History Compass). Tagreeb’s remedy chapter is the provocation: acknowledgment, restitution of seized communal property, and reparative mechanisms modeled on the 1952 Luxembourg Agreement, America’s 1988 Civil Liberties Act, and the 2021 Germany-Namibia accord. “The descendants of communities that paid, for 1,300 years, for the right to remain what they already were are owed more than retrospective sympathy or academic critique. They are owed a historical accounting.”

Why run this the same week as a blockade? Because the whitewash is not an antiquarian error; it is the load-bearing wall of the cognitive front. The same revisionist method that converts a subjugation tax into a “protection fee” converts a war against Jewish statehood into “resistance to settler colonialism,” and the second product just received a respectful hearing from the Church of England. Combating Western Islamism requires dismantling the sanitized narratives at their foundation, in the seminar room before the Synod chamber. That is why the Forum publishes tax registers alongside target assessments.

Two fronts, one war, one test: whether the West can still tell protection from extortion. In the strait, the regime calls a toll booth a security arrangement. In the seminar room, its ideological cousins call a subjugation tax a service charge. The blockade answers the first lie with twenty warships; papers like Tagreeb’s answer the second with primary sources. Hold the strait, and hold the seminar room. Neither front forgives a garrison that goes home.

The years the jizya stood as “a religiously mandated instrument of subjugation,” per the Forum’s new Dhimmitude Project paper, before its modern rebranding as a “protection fee.” The oldest weapon on this week’s battlefield is a tax, and the fight over what to call it is the same fight being waged over “settler colonialism” in the Synod and “shared by all, or denied to all” in the strait. (Source: MEF, Tagreeb.)

• Jalal Tagreeb, Confronting the Legacy of Jizya as an Instrument of Subjugation (July 15): the Dhimmitude Project’s counter-archive
• Sirwan Kajjo, Removing Syria from the Terrorism List Now Is a Risky Bet (July 15)
• Lazar Berman, Iran’s Strikes Show Its Priority Is Flexing Muscle on Hormuz, Not Dealing with Trump (July 15)
• Hussein Aboubakr Mansour, Saudi Arabia’s Challenge to the Abraham Accords (July 15)
• Jonathan Spyer, Israel’s Buffer-Zone Military Strategy and At Beaufort Castle (July 13): two dispatches from the northern line
• Jules Gomes, Anglican Parliament Endorses Libelous Palestinian Manifesto Denying Israel’s Legitimacy (July 13)
• Amine Ayoub, The Rafah Sandbox (July 14) and A Risky Bet on “Reformed” Islamism (July 10)
• Michael Rubin, There’s One Move That Could Keep Iran’s Hated Regime in Power (July 14)
• Saeid Golkar, What the Politics of Tears Means for Iran’s Future (July 10)
• Shay Khatiri, To Win the War Against Iran, the United States Must Seize Qeshm Island (July 11)

The Forum in the news: Spyer’s buffer-zone doctrine ran as a Wall Street Journal op-ed and his Beaufort Castle dispatch in the Jerusalem Post; Berman’s Hormuz analysis led Times of Israel and was republished by JINSA; Rubin’s warning against “magic formula” diplomacy ran in National Security Journal; Golkar and Berman were quoted in the Italian press on Tehran’s war factions; and the Forum’s podcasts carried a situational assessment of the Iran war with Lisa Daftari and an Israel Insider episode with Ashley Perry.

Two favors this morning. Forward this issue to one person who thinks the ideological front is somebody else’s problem, a churchgoer, a trustee, a school-board parent, and if you want the Forum fighting on both fronts every day, in the strait’s policy debate and in the seminar room’s footnotes, support the work directly. The Forum runs on readers, not the institutions it corrects.

That is the board for this morning. Reply and tell me which front worries you more. I read every answer.

Middle East Insider · From Gregg Roman, Executive Director, Middle East Forum

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