Donald Trump says America will “immediately” provide insurance and military protection for ships travelling through the Strait of Hormuz, after Iran claimed “complete control” of the vital waterway. The US president also rebuked Keir Starmer’s supposed lack of co-operation again yesterday, saying: “This is not Winston Churchill that we’re dealing with.” In Tehran, the 56-year-old hardline son of the late Ayatollah, Mojtaba Khamenei, is reportedly the leading contender to be the country’s next Supreme Leader. The UK is invoking its first ever “emergency brake” on issuing visas to nationals from four countries, after ministers concluded that the system was being exploited by would-be asylum seekers. Study visa applications from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Myanmar and Sudan will be halted, as will skilled worker visas for Afghans. Remarkable skies are expected across the UK from tomorrow as a vast plume of Saharan dust drifts over the country. The north African sand will transform sunrises and sunsets into striking displays of deep gold, amber and burnt orange.

When JD Vance endorsed Donald Trump’s second presidential run, it was in a Wall Street Journal column titled: “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars.” If Vance really believed that, says Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times, he can console himself that he shared in a “widespread delusion” that Trump was “anti-war”. The president’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, once sold “No War With Iran” T-shirts. The ludicrous idea of Trump as a “promoter of peace”, which his 2024 campaign leaned into, rests on a “deep, wilful” misunderstanding of his record and character. What he has always hated isn’t war, but the idea that American power should be constrained by idealism or “care for global opinion”.

Trump marked himself out from his Republican rivals by openly trashing the invasion of Iraq. But one of his major complaints was that George W Bush had “failed to take Iraq’s oil”. His supposedly philosophical objection to neoconservatism only extends to its moral wing, which believes in “spreading democracy at the barrel of a gun”. He has long been of one mind with the other wing, fuelled by contempt for diplomacy and multilateral organisations like the UN, and a sense that America would be “reinvigorated by international aggression”. Trump often boasts that he didn’t start any wars in his first term, but it wasn’t for lack of trying: he launched more drone strikes in his first two years than drone-obsessed Barack Obama did in eight. And when he ordered the assassination of Iran’s top military commander, Qassim Soleimani, in 2020, only Iranian restraint prevented escalation. The lesson Trump has taken is that there is no real cost to his belligerence, so on he goes. This has always been the real Trump doctrine. “Not no wars, but no rules.”

🕊️🚀 There’s something about becoming president that makes a man “more hawkish”, says Jim Geraghty in The Washington Post. Bill Clinton ran in 1992 complaining about George HW Bush’s “erratic” foreign adventures, only to use his “war powers” authority more than any other president. Barack Obama opposed the Iraq war then sent 30,000 troops to Afghanistan and killed thousands of people in drone strikes. Now Trump. The reason is probably simple: the CIA’s classified Presidential Daily Brief reveals in grim detail just how many bad people are out there trying to kill Americans. Reading that every day, “how dovish can you remain”?

Israel has promised to kill Iran’s next leader. The question now, says Alireza Nader in Foreign Policy, is what an acceptable replacement would look like. Most prominent is Reza Pahlavi, son of the deposed Shah, who has no political structure inside Iran but has made himself popular with “credulous Western audiences”. Instead of uniting the opposition, Pahlavi’s team has trashed other dissidents to make him look like the only option. Perhaps the most organised of Iran’s opposition groups are the Iranian Kurds, who have fought the regime for decades and whose leaders spoke to Donald Trump by phone on Sunday.

Never before has a US president displayed so much of his own image on the White House walls, say Doug Mills and Larry Buchanan in The New York Times. At least nine portraits of Donald Trump have gone on display around the building over the past year, including three of him pumping his fist after the 2024 assassination attempt in Pennsylvania and one with his face painted in the American flag. Others show him looking at a cross at the top of a mountain; posing alongside previous pro-tariff presidents with the caption “The Tariff Men”; and standing in front of the Stars and Stripes with Ronald Reagan and Abraham Lincoln. To see others, click here.

Iran hasn’t held back in its response to the US-Israeli bombardment, says The Economist, and the regime “could still go further”. The strikes against Arab power plants have so far involved relatively small numbers of drones against low-tier targets; “larger salvoes could come next”. Another option is to disrupt infrastructure with cyber attacks, as they did in 2012 against the Saudi oil giant Aramco and Qatar’s RasGas. Perhaps most devastating would be a strike on water desalination facilities, which provide 42% of the drinking water in the UAE, 86% in Oman and 90% in Kuwait. Back in 2009, US diplomats estimated that a successful attack on Saudi Arabia’s Jubail plant, which then supplied 90% of Riyadh’s water, would “force the kingdom to evacuate its capital within a week”.

One big worry for the US is “asymmetric attrition”, says Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Daily Telegraph. American forces are ploughing through expensive air defence interceptors, reportedly using $4m Patriot missiles to down £20,000 Shahed drones – an approach mocked as “firing gold at plastic”. Another concern is that Iran is holding back its most destructive drones until the Arab states have used up their own interceptor stocks, in order to strike Saudi Arabia’s energy infrastructure. Because it is oil, more than anything else, that will determine the course of this conflict. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards know that Donald Trump won’t countenance US petrol prices becoming exorbitant ahead of November’s midterms. So if he can’t ensure safe passage for tankers through the Strait of Hormuz – which is used to transport a fifth of the world’s oil and seaborne gas – prices will soar and he’ll be forced to the negotiating table. In Tehran, the strategy is simple: “hunker down until Trump reaches his pain threshold”.

The website All The Views In The World has an interactive map showing the longest line of sight from any given location across the world. In perfect, crisp weather conditions with “favourable refraction”, the farthest you can see on Earth is a whopping 329 miles, from an unnamed Himalayan ridge near the Indian-Chinese border to Kyrgyzstan’s Pik Dankova. The longest view in the UK stretches an impressive 144 miles, from Merrick, a mountain in Scotland, past the Isle of Man, to Snowdon in north Wales. To find more mega vistas, click here.

The late Norman Tebbit could be a “good, if slightly unusual” friend in Westminster, says Jack Blackburn in The Times. Speaking at the former Tory cabinet minister’s memorial on Monday, Iain Duncan Smith said Tebbit had once called him during a low in his leadership of the party. “Why don’t you come shooting with me and we’ll go kill something?” Tebbit asked. Duncan Smith declined, saying he had a prior engagement, but Tebbit insisted. “It really helps to get it out of your system.” Again, Duncan Smith politely refused. There was a pause. “Don’t worry,” said Tebbit. “I’ll go shooting and I’ll kill something for you.”

It’s Punch, says The Economist, a seven-month-old Japanese macaque in Ichikawa City Zoo who has gone viral after being abandoned by his mother and bullied and rejected by his peers. Posts about the miserable monkey have appeared more than 630 million times on Reddit, YouTube and X, with some urging him to #HangInTherePunch and others saying they’d like to “wreak vengeance on his tormentors”. One influencer even flew to Japan to check up on him, and the poor primate’s only source of comfort, a stuffed orangutan from Ikea, has sold out in stores across the world. As one fan put it: “Punch is the most loved creature on the Earth right now.”