Kharg Island, located about 15 to 16 nautical miles off the coast of Iran, serves as a critical export hub handling roughly 90 percent of Iran’s crude oil shipments, making it a central node in the country’s energy infrastructure and a key source of revenue.

Trump has publicly suggested the United States could take control of the island to assert influence over Iran’s oil and gas sector, while also acknowledging that a ground operation would be difficult and politically sensitive. In remarks cited by US media, he indicated reluctance to deploy ground troops, while suggesting limited military options could still be considered.

The United States military has already conducted strikes on the island earlier this year, targeting more than 90 military installations, including naval mine storage sites and missile facilities, while reportedly sparing oil infrastructure to avoid long-term economic disruption, according to Central Command assessments cited in reporting.

However, analysts cited by Arab News and Reuters warned that any attempt to physically occupy the island would likely escalate the conflict. Experts from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies said an occupation could prolong the war and fail to deliver a decisive strategic outcome.

Former US Central Command commander Joseph Votel was cited as saying that while a relatively small force could theoretically hold the island, such troops would require extensive logistical support and would remain highly vulnerable to attack.

Iranian officials have reinforced defenses around the island, deploying air-defense systems, mines, and other military assets in surrounding waters. Iranian parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf warned that Iranian forces were prepared to respond forcefully to any incursion, including targeting regional infrastructure.

Military analysts also cautioned that any US presence could be exposed to asymmetric tactics, including drone surveillance and propaganda dissemination of battlefield losses, potentially increasing political pressure on Washington.

Despite heightened tensions, Trump has recently indicated a pause in new strikes following what he described as progress in negotiations with Tehran, suggesting that diplomatic channels remain active alongside military signaling.

In a social media post, Trump said the United States would strike Iran “VERY HARD TONIGHT” and declared that Washington would “assume total control” of Iran’s oil and gas sector, including the strategically important Kharg Island export terminal, at some point in the future.

Trump did not provide details on how such a move could be carried out. Kharg Island is the main hub for Iranian crude exports and a critical source of revenue for the country’s economy. The island is located off Iran’s Gulf coast and serves as a central artery for the nation’s energy shipments.

The comments came as the U.S. military launched a new wave of strikes against Iranian military targets, broadening a campaign that appeared more extensive than operations conducted a day earlier.

U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) said American forces carried out additional strikes against Iranian surveillance systems, communications infrastructure and air defense facilities. According to the command, U.S. Marine Corps, Air Force and Navy assets employed precision-guided munitions against targets viewed as threats to American personnel and commercial maritime traffic in regional waters.

CENTCOM described the operations as defensive measures conducted in response to what it called continuing Iranian aggression.

Iran condemned the attacks, with the Foreign Ministry saying the latest U.S. military action effectively rendered a ceasefire that had held for nearly two months “practically meaningless.”

In a statement, the ministry said the strikes represented a violation of international norms and warned that responsibility for any serious consequences would rest with U.S. leaders.

Speaking at the White House, Trump said military pressure on Iran would continue while diplomatic channels remained open.

“We’re going to be attacking them very hard,” Trump told reporters, while reiterating his administration’s desire for a negotiated settlement.

The president said Washington sought an agreement that would permanently prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. He claimed Tehran had accepted the principle of foregoing nuclear arms but said a final accord had not been concluded.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth echoed the administration’s warnings during a visit to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Hegseth said the strikes were intended to protect American forces and cautioned Tehran against escalating the confrontation further.

“Iran would be unwise to challenge us further,” he said.

The latest exchange has heightened concerns about a broader regional conflict involving the United States and Iran, while adding uncertainty to energy markets and international diplomatic efforts aimed at reducing tensions in the Middle East.

Despite the military escalation, U.S. officials continued to emphasize that diplomacy remains Washington’s preferred path, provided any future agreement includes lasting guarantees that Iran will not develop a nuclear weapons capability.

The statement by Kataeb Hezbollah security chief Abu Mujahid Al-Assaf comes amid heightened tensions following the outbreak of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran in late February, a conflict that triggered a series of drone and rocket attacks by factions operating under the banner of the Islamic Resistance in Iraq against U.S. interests in the country.

Washington responded with strikes on facilities and bases linked to the groups, including Kataeb Hezbollah, killing dozens of fighters, according to the organization and regional media reports.

Since assuming office in mid-May, Iraqi Prime Minister Ali Al-Zaidi has pledged to ensure that weapons remain exclusively in the hands of the state, a longstanding objective of successive Iraqi governments seeking to strengthen state authority and limit the influence of armed non-state actors.

In a statement issued on Saturday, Al-Assaf said “militant action is today a collective duty, and we will carry it out on behalf of the brothers who have decided to abandon it,” signaling that the group intends to continue its activities even as some allied factions move toward closer cooperation with state institutions.

While several Iran-backed factions have reportedly agreed to operate under official structures, Kataeb Hezbollah remains among the groups rejecting discussions on disarmament under what it characterizes as U.S. pressure.

Al-Assaf indicated that the organization was prepared to coordinate with other factions that no longer wished to maintain independent arsenals. He said Kataeb Hezbollah could supervise the transfer and storage of weapons and receive specialized systems, including cruise missiles, arguing that state agencies lacked personnel with the necessary expertise to manage such equipment.

The group has consistently linked any discussion of its weapons to the continued presence of foreign troops in Iraq. Kataeb Hezbollah maintains that it will not consider disarmament while international forces remain deployed in Iraq’s northern Kurdistan region as part of the U.S.-led coalition established in 2014 to combat Islamic State militants.

The coalition is scheduled to conclude its mission in the Kurdistan region by September, a timeline that has become a key reference point in Iraq’s debate over the future role of armed factions and the country’s security architecture.

Oxford computer scientist and artificial intelligence researcher Michael Wooldridge says the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence is being shaped less by scientific inevitability than by competitive pressures among a small group of technology companies racing to avoid falling behind rivals.

In an interview discussing his latest book, Life Lessons from Game Theory: The Art of Thinking Strategically in a Complex World, Wooldridge argued that many of the current tensions surrounding artificial intelligence can be understood through the framework of game theory, particularly scenarios in which competitors continue escalating despite recognizing collective risks.

Wooldridge, a professor at the University of Oxford and one of Britain’s most prominent public communicators on artificial intelligence, said the industry increasingly resembles a strategic trap in which companies continue investing heavily in advanced systems because they believe competitors would gain advantage if they slowed development.

“We’ve got a small number of very wealthy companies that are busy pursuing AI, while at the same time saying that they are afraid that something’s going to go horribly wrong with it,” Wooldridge said. “So why are they busy pursuing it? Because they think if we back down and we don’t pursue it, somebody else will.

”The comments come amid intensifying global competition over artificial intelligence infrastructure, computing capacity and access to data. Major technology firms including OpenAI and Google DeepMind have expanded investments in large-scale machine learning systems, while governments in the United States, Europe and China are increasingly treating AI as a strategic industry tied to economic growth and national security.

Wooldridge said many of the core technologies underpinning today’s AI systems are not recent discoveries. He noted that key neural network techniques central to modern machine learning were developed by the mid-1980s, but computing power and data limitations prevented their wider deployment at the time.

“The only obstacle standing in the way of the AI revolution in the 1980s, really, was that computers weren’t powerful enough and we didn’t have enough data,” he said.He described the emergence of GPT-3 in 2020 as a turning point driven largely by scale rather than a fundamentally new scientific breakthrough.

According to Wooldridge, many researchers initially doubted whether simply expanding computational power and training data would substantially improve performance. He said the success of that approach surprised a significant portion of the research community.

OpenAI’s development strategy demonstrated that scaling existing methods could generate major commercial results, he said, although he cautioned against interpreting those advances as evidence that artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is imminent.Executives including Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis have publicly discussed the possibility of achieving human-level general intelligence within years. Wooldridge said those forecasts remain overly optimistic.

He argued that current systems still struggle with tasks requiring physical reasoning and adaptation in unfamiliar environments. While advanced chat systems can process complex linguistic queries, he said they remain unable to reliably perform many basic real-world activities that humans execute routinely.

“You can talk to ChatGPT about quantum mechanics in Latin,” Wooldridge said, “but at the same time, we don’t have AI that could come into your house, that it had never seen before, locate the kitchen and clear the dinner table.”Wooldridge said data availability may become one of the industry’s most significant constraints.

He noted that large language models already consume enormous quantities of text and digital material, creating pressure to secure new sources of information for future training cycles.“The whole of Wikipedia made up just 3% of GPT-3’s training data,” he said. “Where do you get 10 times more data from next time around?”That search for data, he argued, could reshape relationships between governments, corporations and individuals.

Wooldridge pointed to healthcare systems, wearable devices and online content creators as examples of potentially valuable data sources for future AI development.“The NHS is sitting on a huge amount of data about human beings,” he said. “That’s the most valuable kind of data imaginable.”He warned that commercial pressure to obtain increasingly detailed behavioral information could create incentives for broader surveillance and monitoring.

Wooldridge suggested future generations of online influencers may routinely agree to extensive data collection arrangements in exchange for visibility and commercial opportunity.The professor’s latest work focuses primarily on game theory, which he defines as the study of interactions between self-interested actors.

He said many geopolitical disputes, commercial rivalries and social conflicts can be interpreted through a relatively small number of strategic models.One recurring example in his analysis is the “game of chicken,” in which opposing sides continue escalating until one party backs down or both suffer severe consequences.

Wooldridge compared the framework to current tensions involving the United States and Iran, describing unpredictability as a recognized strategic tactic within game theory.“You’ve got two sides with ever-escalating threats against each other,” he said. “Somebody’s got to back down at some point.

”Wooldridge added that highly unpredictable behavior can complicate strategic decision-making because opponents struggle to assess likely responses and risks. Under such conditions, he said, game theory often encourages actors to prepare for worst-case outcomes.He also criticized what he described as a growing “zero-sum” political mindset in parts of modern public discourse.

In game theory, he said, zero-sum situations are not merely competitions where one side wins and another loses, but systems where actors are incentivized to maximize damage to opponents.“This zero-sum mentality is very damaging,” Wooldridge said.

“One of the important lessons from game theory is that, actually, the majority of interactions that we’re in are not zero-sum.”He linked that framework to populist political narratives that portray economic or social gains by one group as direct losses for another. As an alternative, Wooldridge highlighted the “Veil of Ignorance,” a philosophical model developed by political philosopher John Rawls in 1971.

The thought experiment asks individuals to design a society without knowing which position they themselves would ultimately occupy within it.Wooldridge said the model creates incentives for fairer social systems because participants must account for the possibility of ending up disadvantaged. He noted that former U.S. presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama had both expressed interest in Rawls’ ideas.

Despite concerns surrounding AI development, Wooldridge said he remains optimistic about technology and scientific inquiry. Growing up in rural Herefordshire, he taught himself programming after repeatedly visiting a local electronics shop that displayed a TRS-80 computer in its storefront during the early 1980s.

He later completed a doctorate in artificial intelligence and went on to publish more than 500 scientific papers and multiple books, while also presenting public lectures on the social implications of AI.

Asked whether students should avoid fields vulnerable to automation, Wooldridge rejected the idea that education should be driven solely by labor market forecasts.

“I didn’t get into computing because I thought it was going to give me a good job,” he said. “I got into it because I was just really interested in it.”

The UAE blamed Iran for the attack, which occurred on Monday at an energy installation along the Gulf coast. Iranian state television said the Islamic republic had “no pre-planned program” to target oil facilities in the UAE.

India’s foreign ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said New Delhi “calls for immediate cessation of these hostilities and the targeting of civilian infrastructure and innocent civilians,” adding that the country supports efforts toward a peaceful resolution.

He also urged “free and unimpeded navigation and commerce through the Strait of Hormuz in keeping with international law.”The incident comes amid broader disruptions to energy supply chains since the onset of conflict in the Middle East in late February. India, the world’s third-largest oil importer, typically sources about half of its crude oil through the Strait of Hormuz, a critical chokepoint for global energy shipments.

Analysts have warned that India’s reliance on imported energy, combined with relatively modest strategic reserves compared with major consumers such as China, leaves it exposed to price volatility and supply shocks linked to regional instability.Shipping and import data indicate that New Delhi has moved to offset disruptions by diversifying supply, including increased reliance on Russian crude.

This shift follows earlier efforts to reduce dependence on such imports amid pressure from U.S. trade measures.India has reiterated its readiness to support diplomatic initiatives aimed at stabilizing the region, as tensions continue to threaten key maritime routes and energy infrastructure.

Speaking at a gathering of European leaders in Yerevan, Macron said a joint approach between Washington and Tehran was the only viable path to restoring navigation through the strait, a critical corridor for global energy supplies.

“What we want above all is a coordinated reopening by the United States and Iran that is the only solution,” Macron said, emphasizing the need for diplomatic alignment to ensure safe passage.His remarks come as the U.S. military continues operations aimed at escorting vessels out of the waterway amid heightened regional tensions.

The situation has raised concerns among global energy markets and shipping operators over potential supply disruptions.Macron also reiterated France’s reluctance to engage in military action under uncertain conditions, stating that Paris would not participate in operations lacking a clear framework.

France, alongside the United Kingdom, has been working to build a coalition to secure the strait, contingent on broader de-escalation and stability in the region.

Speaking in Canberra after talks with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Takaichi said both countries would act with urgency to strengthen energy security amid a supply squeeze linked to reduced shipping through the strait.

Roughly one-fifth of the world’s oil typically transits through the Strait of Hormuz, with flows curtailed after Iran throttled shipping following attacks by the United States and Israel. About 80 percent of that oil is destined for Asia, according to the International Energy Agency.

“The effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz has been inflicting enormous impact on the Indo-Pacific,” Takaichi told reporters, adding that Japan and Australia would maintain close communication to respond to the situation.

Both governments said they would seek to enhance resilience and autonomy in energy supply chains. Australia is Japan’s largest supplier of liquefied natural gas, while Japan provides a share of refined fuel products, including diesel, to Australia.

The two sides issued a series of agreements covering energy, economic cooperation, defense and critical minerals. Albanese said the measures would help shield Australia from “global shocks” stemming from conflict in the Middle East.

Japan has also emphasized the importance of securing stable supplies of critical minerals used in semiconductors, electric vehicle batteries and defense systems. Australia has positioned itself as a key supplier of such resources, highlighting its reserves as an alternative to concentrated global supply chains.

Defense cooperation has expanded alongside economic ties, including a deal valued at around Aus$10 billion for Japan to supply Mogami-class stealth warships to the Australian navy.

In a separate foreign policy address in Vietnam over the weekend, Takaichi reiterated Japan’s commitment to a “free and open Indo-Pacific,” a strategy aimed at strengthening regional security and supply chain resilience.
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Citing U.S. officials familiar with the matter, the report said Trump concluded during a White House Situation Room meeting on Monday that both resuming bombing campaigns and fully stepping back from the conflict carried greater risks than maintaining a naval squeeze on Iran’s oil exports and shipping routes.

According to the report, Trump believes Iran is not negotiating in good faith and wants Tehran to suspend uranium enrichment for 20 years while accepting strict long-term restrictions on its nuclear activities. Officials said the administration views the blockade as a way to intensify pressure without immediately reopening large-scale military operations.

Trump signaled frustration publicly on Wednesday, writing on his Truth Social platform that Iran “can’t get their act together” and warning Tehran to “better get smart soon.”

“Iran can’t get their act together. They don’t know how to sign a nonnuclear deal.They better get smart soon!” Trump posted, alongside an image carrying the caption “NO MORE MR. NICE GUY!”The reported strategy would rely on the U.S. Navy continuing efforts to restrict vessels traveling to and from Iranian ports, further tightening pressure on oil exports that are central to Iran’s economy.

Analysts say the approach risks extending instability around the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most critical energy transit routes.Oil markets reacted sharply to reports of a prolonged blockade, with Brent crude rising to a one-month high above $114 a barrel on concerns over sustained supply disruption and continued uncertainty over shipping through the Hormuz corridor.

The White House has not formally announced a policy shift, and Iranian officials have not publicly responded to the Wall Street Journal report.The decision suggests Washington may be preparing for a prolonged standoff in which active fighting remains limited but diplomacy remains frozen, leaving the conflict in what analysts describe as a “no-deal, no-war” phase.

Even before the latest hostilities, analysts described Iran’s economy as deeply fragile, weighed down by sanctions, energy imbalances, inflation and declining exports. The impact of renewed strikes and the effective closure of Hormuz a critical artery for global energy shipments has sharply intensified those pressures.

The blockade threatens more than 90% of Iran’s annual trade, estimated at over $100 billion, according to analysts, cutting off vital oil exports that account for roughly 80% of government revenue. Estimates cited by experts suggest losses of around $435 million per day, potentially exceeding $13 billion monthly.

Energy infrastructure constraints are compounding the crisis. With limited storage capacity and continued production, Iran risks being forced to halt oil output within weeks, raising the possibility of long-term damage to oil fields and a permanent reduction in production capacity.

On the domestic front, economic indicators point to severe distress. The Iranian rial has sharply depreciated, while food inflation has surged into triple digits, eroding purchasing power and fueling social discontent.

Shortages of energy have also disrupted key industries such as steel, cement and petrochemicals.The blockade’s effects are further magnified by limited alternative trade routes. Infrastructure outside the Gulf, including overland corridors and non-Hormuz ports, can handle only a fraction of normal throughput, leaving Iran with few options to offset lost maritime access.

Internal divisions are also emerging over the management of foreign currency revenues and economic policy, with some officials warning that significant portions of export earnings are not reaching state coffers.

Former Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has called for compromise, urging Tehran to consider limiting its nuclear program and reopening Hormuz in exchange for sanctions relief to prevent further economic deterioration.Analysts say the government’s response is driven less by economic logic than by strategic considerations.

Sanam Vakil of Chatham House said the conflict is viewed by Iran’s leadership as existential, limiting the likelihood of policy shifts despite economic strain.The longer-term outlook remains uncertain.

Researchers at Royal United Services Institute warn that postwar recovery could be hampered by damaged infrastructure, reduced access to regional financial networks and strained ties with Gulf partners, particularly the United Arab Emirates, a key trade hub for Iran.

With reconstruction costs expected to be substantial and trade channels constrained, the economic consequences of the conflict may prove more enduring than the military phase itself.

Birol told Swiss newspaper Neue Zuercher Zeitung that recovery timelines would vary across countries, with some producers facing longer setbacks than others. He said overall output in the region was expected to return to pre-war levels in roughly two years, citing uneven infrastructure damage and differing production capacities.

He cautioned that markets may be underestimating the consequences of continued instability in the Strait of Hormuz, a key artery for global oil and gas shipments. While cargoes dispatched before the outbreak of hostilities have largely reached their destinations, he said the absence of new shipments in March was beginning to create supply gaps, particularly for Asian markets.

“No new tankers were loaded in March,” Birol said, adding that if the strait remains closed, the shortfall could translate into sustained upward pressure on global energy prices.The disruption comes amid heightened geopolitical tensions in the region, which have curtailed production and complicated export logistics.

Energy analysts have pointed to the Strait of Hormuz as a critical vulnerability, handling a significant share of global seaborne crude and liquefied natural gas flows.Birol said the IEA remained prepared to intervene through coordinated releases of emergency oil reserves, following a similar move earlier in March aimed at stabilizing markets.

He added that while such action was not yet imminent, it remained under active consideration should supply conditions deteriorate further.