Category Added in a WPeMatico Campaign
A former Trump Administration economics adviser made a bold prediction when I spoke to him last week: “If the Strait of Hormuz isn’t opened by Labor Day, Trump will have a political problem worse than Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan combined.”
Well, that wasn’t the response I was planning on, that’s for sure. While clearly the former official was trying to make a dramatic point, the crisis is clear.
Iran habitually claims that it has shot down American aircraft. Whenever the United States does anything with its military during this tenuous ceasefire period, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) is sure to come back with a propaganda statement that it has successfully reacted against the United States.
This happened again over the Memorial Day holiday. The IRGC boasted that it shot down an MQ-9 Reaper drone on May 26 and that it fired on an F-35 and may have damaged it. The Iranians said that the Lightning II was forced to leave Iranian airspace as the pilot fled in fear.
Welcome to The Ukraine Compass, a weekly digest of Ukrainian commentary and analysis from across the political spectrum only for War on the Rocks members. Each Monday, we bring you a curated selection of articles from Ukrainian media offering insight into how Ukrainians themselves debate the issues shaping their country.American coverage often narrows the view to the battlefield — these pieces widen it, revealing the texture of daily life, politics, and public argument in a nation at war.
Ukraine’s Defence Procurement Agency DOT has finalised its largest procurement by value to date, for 155mm long-range artillery rounds.
“The GOP is in a silent state of panic.” That’s what a former 2016 and 2020 top Trump presidential campaign official told me this morning. And you don’t need a Princeton PhD in political science to understand why. The president’s political position as of late May 2026 is the worst of his career, and the people inside his own party who track these numbers professionally have stopped pretending otherwise.
The most recent aggregate of Gallup, Reuters/Ipsos, YouGov, Quinnipiac, and Morning Consult places Trump’s approval at 38.6 percent against 58.
After Franklin D. Roosevelt returned from his meeting with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in Casablanca in January 1943, Hap Arnold knew something had to change.
Arnold, the legendary general who led the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II, didn’t like that FDR flew to Morocco on a civilian plane. Believing it was the military’s job to transport the commander in chief, he ordered that a transport version of the B-24 bomber be converted for the president’s use.
Summary and Key Points: In 2009, Defense Secretary Robert Gates capped F-22 Raptor production at 187 aircraft — far below the hundreds originally planned — arguing the stealth fighter was too expensive and irrelevant to the wars the United States was actually fighting.
-The production line shut down permanently in 2011. At the time, the decision was defensible. In hindsight, it was a strategic miscalculation. China has since fielded more than 200 Chengdu J-20 stealth fighters, a number still climbing, while the United States cannot build additional F-22s at any price.
U.S.
On May 25, 2026, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov placed a phone call to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The substance of what Lavrov said in that call has now been confirmed by the Russian Foreign Ministry’s own readout and tracked across multiple Western and Ukrainian outlets. Moscow had decided to begin striking what it called the “decision-making centers” of the Ukrainian government in Kyiv.
Key Points and Summary: Operation Epic Fury against Iran exposed a critical problem: the United States lacks sufficient bombers. With only 19 B-2 Spirit stealth bombers and roughly 45 B-1B Lancers in the fleet, the Air Force found itself short of strike aircraft capable of hitting thousands of hardened Iranian targets including underground missile launchers and nuclear infrastructure.
-The B-21 Raider replacement is still five years from readiness. Rather than let both aircraft retire as planned, the Air Force is now proposing $1.
In 2004, India struck what appeared to be the deal of the century — Russia handed over the Admiral Gorshkov aircraft carrier at virtually no cost, desperate to offload a vessel it could no longer afford to maintain. India then invested over $2 billion in upgrades at Russia’s Sevmash shipyard, expecting delivery in 2008. The ship didn’t arrive until 2013. When it finally left Russia for India, it broke down mid-transit. Russian engineers blamed Chinese components. The Indians had no leverage to walk away.