Wednesday briefing: How Trump’s Iran gamble has produced a crisis reshaping the global order

Donald Trump misjudged how quickly he could win this war. Photograph: Abedin Taherkenareh/EPAView image in fullscreenDonald Trump misjudged how quickly he could win this war. Photograph: Abedin Taherkenareh/EPAWednesday briefing: How Trump’s Iran gamble has produced a crisis reshaping the global orderIn today’s newsletter: ​A White House operating without expertise, strategy or restraint ​is stuck in a conflict with no easy way out, which is sending economic shockwaves far beyond its own bordersGood morning.

Within two hours of entering No 10 on Monday afternoon, Andy Burnham had his first call with Donald Trump. After chit-chatting about the football (both agreed England had an “excellent tournament”) and Manchester (our new prime minister invited the president to visit the city Trump once described as a “town”), they got on to far trickier territory: the strait of Hormuz.The US has attacked Iran for the eleventh consecutive night, hitting aircraft hangars and drone storage sites across the country.

It came after Iran launched retaliatory strikes on US air bases and neighbouring Gulf states, which have accused it of deliberately targeting desalination plants that are essential to life in the region. Each side now claims it is preventing the other from gaining control over the strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s oil was shipped before the war began. Vessels carrying crucial shipments of oil, gas and fertiliser remain at a standstill.

“Operation Epic Fury” started with the aim of regime change. Since then, its objective has morphed into reopening the strait and undoing the damage caused by the US and Israel’s decision to start the war. The president drastically underestimated Iran’s capacity for enduring pain, and is now trying to bomb his way out of a conflict that he created.

For today’s First Edition, I spoke to Vali Nasr, professor of International Affairs and Middle East Studies and author of Iran’s Grand Strategy, about the war over the world’s most critical bottleneck. That’s after the headlines.Five big stories UK politics | Andy Burnham is under mounting pressure to explain how he will pay for his policy pledges as he implored his new cabinet to examine “all possible ways” to tackle the cost of living crisis.

UK news | A man has appeared in court charged with the murder of the former MP and Reform UK spokesperson Ann Widdecombe. Joshua Kerry, 28, is accused of killing the former Conservative minister at her home in Haytor, Devon, by hitting her on the head with a hammer 21 times. Middle East | The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, told the Senate the US-Israel war on Iran had cost $37.

5bn so far, as he faced lawmakers furious over the conflict’s soaring price tag and the deaths last week of three American service members. Climate crisis | About 23 million people will be banned from using hosepipes by this weekend, as England and Wales moves closer to drought status. Ukraine | Volodymyr Zelenskyy has fired Ukraine’s commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi and offered a “prominent position” to the defence minister he sacked last week in a move that sparked nationwide protests.

In depth: ‘In his mind, this was a legacy-building transformation’View image in fullscreenDonald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu seemed to have not thought through the full consequences of attacking Iran. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images“I’m not going to start wars,” Donald Trump told voters on election night in 2024. His decision to bomb Iran on 28 February in partnership with Benjamin Netanyahu was astonishing both in its aggression and its audacious break with this promise.

Trump did nothing to prepare the US for war, gave seemingly no thought to the fact that Iran would inevitably hold the strait hostage if it came under attack, and resorted to contradictory explanations for his decision. In the war’s early days, he described “what we did in Venezuela” as a model for what he hoped to achieve. “He thought he would go down in history as the American president who had resolved the Iran problem,” Nasr told me.

“In his mind, this was a legacy-building transformation that would be quick and cost-free.”That has proven a fatal miscalculation. Pete Hegseth, the US self-styled “secretary of war”, said the early US strikes that killed Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, had “cut off the head of the snake.”

But regime change is now a distant prospect. Trump underestimated the resilience of the Iranian regime and overestimated the power of protests against it. After just five months, his misadventure is as unpopular with American voters as the Vietnam war was six years in.

It could yet escalate into a wider regional conflict, with the Houthis threatening a maritime embargo on Saudi Arabia. Even Trump – whose private firm, The Trump Organization, is at work on a skyscraper in Dubai – won’t be insulated from the consequences of this violence.What happened to the ceasefire?

The memorandum of understanding, a vague, short docume