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I’m writing this from Boston, where my wife and I came to visit our friends at Boston Children’s Hospital, where their kid has been undergoing procedures. It also meant I was doing today’s Across the Pond from a family friend’s home library, in front of what James correctly identified as an intellectual’s bookshelf.
Even with a lot going on at the personal level, James and I still managed to have one of our best conversations yet. James joined from sunny Edinburgh, and we did what we always do: turned the cameras on, started talking, and let the conversation go where it needed to go.
This week, we took a look at the full scope of the Iran War’s fallout. The ceasefire whiplash has become a weekly ritual. The strategic reality that Iran has discovered a deterrent more powerful than nuclear weapons. The global economic damage that is now being measured in food shortages, stagflation warnings, and European central banks postponing rate cuts. The radicalization risks that are not getting nearly enough coverage. The UK’s impossible position under Keir Starmer. And a question that I think about constantly: what does it actually take to oppose Trump effectively?
We also got into the Virginia redistricting win that came through last night, what it means for the midterm map, and why Vance is now permanently attached to this war’s outcome, whether he wants to be or not.
As always, watch the full conversation above and read the key takeaways below.
Groundhog Day At The Strait Of Hormuz
We are nearing month two of a conflict that keeps recycling the same headlines. James put it well: journalists are running out of words because Trump has put the world in a loop. Ceasefire extended. Strait opens. Strait closes. Vance flies to Pakistan. Repeat.
This morning, the UK Maritime Trade Operations reported two ships attacked near the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s IRGC claimed they seized two vessels for “disrupting order and safety.” This directly undermines Trump’s repeated claim that Iran’s Navy has been decimated and its military capability obliterated. They clearly have enough left to seize commercial vessels.
The ceasefire deadline that was set to expire yesterday has been extended again, this time until Iran submits a unified proposal. Trump said he was waiting on Iran’s “fractured” government. The naval blockade on Iranian ports remains in place. Iran has said it will not negotiate under the shadow of threats while the blockade continues.
James raised the Groundhog Day quality of all of this: the same headlines, the same positions, the same cycle of escalation and retreat. I made the point that the madman theory only works if there’s an actual theory underneath it. A strategy requires an end goal. If there is no overarching goal, you’re left with a madman screaming in a White House failing to contain him.
Trump screamed at aides for hours after learning a fighter jet had been shot down, according to the Wall Street Journal, citing a senior administration official. The reporting also indicated he was kept out of the room during planning for the downed pilot rescue operation because officials feared he would interfere. The President of the United States was excluded from a military operation because his own team couldn’t trust him in the room.
We are back to the same place we were two weeks ago: genocidal threats, civilian infrastructure targeting, a blockade, and negotiations going nowhere. The primary objective of these negotiations is to reopen a strait that was open before the war started.
Iran Believes It Has The Strategic Upper Hand
Whatever happens from here, one thing is already settled. Iran has learned something about its own power that it did not fully understand before this war began. That knowledge cannot be unlearned.
I made the core point: Iran now knows it has a more powerful and accessible deterrent than a nuclear weapon. The ability to close the Strait of Hormuz and short-circuit the global economy at will is a discovery this war handed them. They watched Kim Jong-un get treated with deference because of his nuclear program. Now they have something more immediate: a chokepoint that moves 20% of the world’s oil, 20% of its liquefied natural gas, fertilizer, helium used to cool MRI machines, and manufacture semiconductors. They closed it and watched the world convulse. That is a lesson they will not forget.
Iran tried to leverage the Strait during the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s, but this is the first time they’ve seen the full scope of its power. The International Crisis Group’s Iran Project Director Ali Vaez put it plainly: “In the attempt to try to prevent Iran from developing a weapon of mass destruction, the U.S. handed Iran a weapon of mass disruption.”
The European Central Bank postponed planned interest rate reductions and raised its 2026 inflation forecast. UK inflation is projected to breach 5%. Chemical and steel manufacturers across Europe have imposed surcharges of up to 30%. Arab countries absorbed over $120 billion in damage by the end of March.
We now have a more extreme Iran led by a new supreme leader who does not carry the previous fatwa against nuclear weapons or the commitment that produced the JCPOA. We achieved nothing that was promised and created the conditions for something more dangerous than what we started with.
The Global Whiplash — A View From The UK
James gave me a clear window into what this looks like from outside the United States. The picture is not flattering.
On April 17, 49 countries gathered in Paris for an emergency summit to plan a multilateral naval mission to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, coordinated independently of Washington. Starmer was there. Macron was there. Merz was there. While they were in that meeting, the announcement came through that Iran had opened the Strait. James’s reaction: Imagine being the person who pulled that meeting together. Then, Trump maintained the U.S. blockade on Iranian ports, Iran concluded the ceasefire conditions weren’t being met, and by April 18, the strait was closed again. The entire episode in a couple of days.
King Charles is still planning a visit to the United States. James’s read is that there is very little public sympathy in the UK for that decision, cutting across the political spectrum. Even conservatives who might ordinarily defend the monarchy feel it’s disrespectful to the institution, given how Trump has treated British allies. James’s view: Charles should have done a video message celebrating the U.S.’s 250th anniversary, drawn a clear line between the American people and the Trump administration, and declined the visit. Instead, the government is hoping the royal visit buys a few more weeks of Trump being slightly less hostile to Britain. James called it sycophancy, which he is right about.
James just received a Reform UK campaign leaflet for the May 7th Scottish Parliament elections. It says “Make Scotland Great Again” on it. At the bottom: a demand that the Union Jack and the Scottish flag fly high, explicitly contrasted with the Palestinian flag. James was direct about what that means: they are not talking about marches where people wave Israeli flags. They are not evoking Scotland’s history of flying the ANC flag during the anti-apartheid movement. They are targeting Muslims. The MAGA playbook has been exported to Scotland wholesale.
Trump is now a live question in Scottish Parliament debates, Welsh Parliament debates, and English local council elections. How you stand up to Donald Trump was a centerpiece of a recent Scottish leaders’ debate. James made the point that this is the overspill of American politics into every corner of democratic life globally, and it will continue until it is actually dealt with at the source.
James described the general UK public sentiment: a fatigue that has quietly curdled into an eye roll at anything American. Not hatred of Americans, he was clear about that, but an exhaustion at having to absorb American politics on top of everything else. It is pointed squarely at the administration.
A Factory Of Hatred
James used a phrase in this conversation that I want to make sure lands properly: factory of hatred. It is the right frame for what this war is producing at the ideological level, and it is not getting nearly enough coverage.
James made the argument that bombing Iran has not weakened the Ayatollahs ideologically. It has strengthened them. Generations of Iranians who were questioning the regime, who were watching the IRGC harass their sisters in the streets and thinking, wait, is America actually the threat here, now have proof that American military power is willing to bomb their country. That proof likely validates claims the Iranian leadership has made for decades. The anti-American ideology that fuels these regimes is now being fed by American actions.
I raised the Minab school strike as the most direct illustration of this. That is a small town. Everybody knew those girls. At least 175 children and their teachers were killed. The reverberation of that single strike, if you are a young boy, if you are one of those children’s brothers, is a radicalization risk. You do not need a central command to produce terrorism. You need desperation, grief, and a ready-made ideological framework that tells you who is responsible.
The ISIS parallel is not rhetorical. ISIS did not come from nowhere. It emerged from the destabilization of Iraq and Syria, from the power vacuum created when we toppled a regime without a plan for what followed, and then abandoned the people who helped us. I raised the Kurds specifically: repeatedly armed, repeatedly abandoned. James noted that young British Muslim men, already feeling culturally dislocated, were recruited online by ISIS with promises of identity and belonging. Most of them are dead now. That cycle is going to repeat.
I put it plainly: the next Democratic administration is likely going to inherit a resurgence of radical jihadism that Trump created the conditions for, and Republicans will find a way to blame Democrats for it. That is the pattern. Bush created the environment, Obama grappled with ISIS, and Trump fear-mongered about it while creating the next round of terrorists. The factory keeps running.
James added that infrastructure can be destroyed, but ideas cannot be bombed. And when you become the living proof of what the Ayatollah has been saying about America for forty years, you do not weaken that ideology. You give it new life.
Trump Is Amoral — Understanding That Is the Key to Opposing Him
This is something I’ve come to understand after eleven years of covering Trump, and I think it explains why so many world leaders keep getting it wrong with him.
Trump is amoral. I want to be precise about that word. He has no moral compass, and he projects that worldview onto everyone else. He assumes that everyone is performing, that decency is an act, that virtue is signaling, and that there is no genuine self-sacrifice. That is why he called soldiers suckers and losers. He genuinely cannot understand what is in it for them. James added: In Trump’s mind, he is the honest one, because he is honest about playing the game. Everyone else, in his view, is pretending not to play it.
Because of that worldview, he respects people who push back effectively. He may attack them publicly, but behind closed doors, he registers them as winners. Mamdani called him a fascist, and Trump is effusive about him. Mark Carney gave one of the most effective speeches against Trump by any foreign leader, redefining the global order without calling him an unstable maniac, and Trump has not gone to war against Canada or hit them with additional tariffs. Nancy Pelosi. He shit-talked her constantly, but respects her privately.
Starmer does not understand this. James told a story I found revealing: in 2017, at a Labour Party conference in Brighton, Starmer told a room of nine people that he does not care about politics, he cares about the law and international law. That is an honorable worldview. It is also completely incompatible with understanding a man who sees everything as a performance with no moral stakes. Starmer cannot put himself in Trump’s headspace. He cannot understand someone who looks at a public servant taking a modest salary and thinks: sucker.
The supplication strategy does not work. James said that the UK-U.S. relationship has been maintained not by Starmer and Trump but by civil servants, the so-called deep state, people doing unglamorous work out of genuine service who are holding the institutional relationship together while the principals cannot find common ground. The animosity toward those people is one of the most damaging things Trump has done to the architecture of democratic governance.
The path forward, for world leaders and for Democrats alike, is to understand what drives him and oppose him on those terms. You do not go to his level. But you have to be inventive, effective, and willing to trigger the right pressure points. The Lincoln Project running ads in Mar-a-Lago to get under his skin understood this. Mamdani understood this. Carney understood this. The leaders who groveled got nothing.
Virginia, Vance, & What Comes Next
Before we closed out, I flagged something that happened last night that deserves more attention than it is getting.
Virginia’s redistricting referendum passed. That is a four-plus-seat gain for Democrats from a single state vote. It was close, but it passed. That is a direct result of the Democratic organizing and the broader anti-Trump environment we have been tracking all year. It matters for the House math heading into November.
Vance now owns this war. He tried to build a record of quiet opposition through strategic leaks to the Haberman-Swan piece. He tried to position himself as the reluctant participant who saw the risks. Now he is heading to Pakistan again to lead negotiations, and whatever happens next is attached to him. If talks collapse again, that collapse is his. If the ceasefire deteriorates further, that deterioration is his. He has negative political capital on this issue and no obvious way to recover it heading into 2028.
The next administration, Democratic or otherwise, is going to inherit the full weight of what this war has produced: a more extreme Iran, a resurgence of radicalization risks, a fractured transatlantic alliance, and a global order that has absorbed a serious lesson about what American leadership now means. That inheritance is going to require more than competence. It is going to require a clear moral and strategic vision for how to rebuild what was broken.
Bottom Line
Trump’s handling of the Iran War has created unsustainable global whiplash. Iran has learned that it can short-circuit the global economy at will, and that knowledge is now permanently part of the strategic landscape. James called it a factory of hatred, and he is right: the ideological damage from this war will outlast the military damage by a generation. Trump handed Iran a weapon of mass disruption in exchange for a more extreme regime, a destabilized Lebanon, and a global economic crisis that is still unfolding.
Meanwhile, Virginia passed redistricting last night. The midterms are coming. The MAGA fractures are real. Democrats have the advantage.
James is out there in Edinburgh fighting this fight. I am here in Brooklyn doing the same. Support independent journalism that tells the truth about what is happening. Subscribe to James Matthewson. And if you have not yet become a paid subscriber to Ahmed Baba News, you can do that below. And if you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you! It truly means a lot. Independent media runs on the people who back it.
