“Roughly half of Iran’s missile launchers are still intact and thousands of one-way attack drones remain in Iran’s arsenal despite the daily pounding by US and Israeli strikes against military targets over the past five weeks, according to recent US intelligence assessments,” CNN reports.

Said one source: “They are still very much poised to wreak absolute havoc throughout the entire region.”

“President Trump has unapologetically wielded the power of the United States on the global stage, taking a much more belligerent approach economically and militarily to try to dictate the actions of other countries,” the New York Times reports.

“From high tariffs to the war with Iran, Mr. Trump has claimed that this aggressive behavior internationally has only upsides, and that past leaders were fools for refusing to tap into America’s power.”

“But one clear drawback of the strategy is emerging. While many countries have acceded to the president’s demands, some have found a highly effective new way to fight back. Mr. Trump’s aggression has given them the opportunity to test their control over choke points, threatening the United States and the global economy.”

Time: “Key Trump officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, were surprised by the barrage of retaliatory attacks Tehran launched against U.S. and Israeli targets across the region, including in countries long assumed to be off-limits: Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar, a state that had both harbored Iran’s terrorist proxies and served as a conduit for backchannel diplomacy between the U.S. and Hamas. The response shattered the assumption that Tehran would confine itself to performative retaliation.” 

“In internal deliberations before the war’s launch, Hegseth had pointed to Iran’s muted reaction to Trump’s past attacks as evidence that calibrated force could impose costs on Tehran without triggering a broader war.”

Said one insider: “Hegseth was caught off guard. There’s no question.”

Richard Haass: “The president gave a primetime address last night. Normally, when presidents do such a thing, they intend to make a major announcement. I thought it was 70% likely that Trump would declare victory (in the process, misrepresenting or exaggerating what had been accomplished) and lay out an exit strategy. I gave it around a 30% chance that he would escalate, either by undertaking a mission to pressure Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz (perhaps by seizing one or more islands) or by attempting to take possession of and extract Iran’s known enriched uranium. Both, inevitably, involve boots on the ground.”

“What I didn’t foresee was that he would do neither.”

New York Times: “When President Trump moved to claw back vast sums of foreign aid funding last year — first by winning party-line approval from the G.O.P.-controlled Congress to cancel the spending, then by unilaterally doing so without giving lawmakers time to object — his administration did not say which programs it planned to defund.”

“New data reviewed by The New York Times presents the clearest picture yet of where the administration chose to make the spending cuts. It was mostly by taking a meat ax to programs that once enjoyed bipartisan backing on Capitol Hill, as well as slashing almost 90 percent of U.S. economic aid to Africa, by far the hardest hit by Mr. Trump of any region across the globe.”