The Levant Files Editorial Room
Mr. President,
On Wednesday, Iran will be all but cut off from the world's skies. At 12:01 a.m. Eastern Time, the grace period your Treasury gave Iranian aviation expires. All 27 of Iran's remaining airlines have been on your blacklist since 8 September. Foreign carriers have lost the licences they need to fly into Iran, pay for overflights or carry out emergency repairs. Mahan Air has already abandoned Muscat, Istanbul, Ankara and Georgia.
This is what your Iran policy has come to. You are grounding the aircraft of a nation of some 90 million people because your armed forces cannot win the war you started.
Seven months ago, hand in hand with Israel, you launched a war that echoes the doomed attempt by Britain, France and Israel to punish Nasser's Egypt in 1956. Seven months later, Iran's undemocratic regime is still standing. It is still punishing its own people, and it is still able to hurt the Levant, the global economy and the energy markets.
It is time to accept the inevitable: the most powerful military in the world cannot bring one of its archenemies to heel.
Your forces have spent months destroying Iran's ageing, Cold War-era navy and air force. Yet the so-called Islamic Republic can still strike its neighbours across the region and inflict costly damage.
One of your stated aims was to eliminate Tehran's nuclear capability. So we must ask: where is Iran's hidden uranium? Inspectors have not been able to verify the roughly 440 kilograms of 60%-enriched material since June 2025. What is your plan to find and destroy it?
At the start of this year, the brave people of Iran rose up against oppression. Thousands were killed, tens of thousands were arrested, and hundreds were sentenced to death. Then you arrived and threw a dying regime a lifeline with a policy that leads nowhere.
Now you speak of three options: obliterate Iran, let it "rot" economically, or make a deal.
Let us take them one by one.
Obliteration? Really? Will the United States use a nuclear weapon for the third time in history? Or will it send its troops into a certain deathtrap inside Iran?
Economic strangulation? Against a regime that has survived for almost half a century?
A deal? What kind? A Venezuela scenario, in which Washington takes control of Iran's energy reserves? Dream on. Iran is not Venezuela.
To sum up, Mr. President, in seven months you have extinguished the Iranian people's hopes for a better future and pushed the world's energy market into crisis. Your choices are now few. One is the "nuclear" option, whether that means the bomb itself or ground troops. The other is a face-saving agreement with a militarist regime.
Well done, President Trump! Your "achievement" is already part of the Levant's tragic recent history.
A note from The Levant Files
The Levant Files stands with our colleagues in the American press. We stand against any attempt to intimidate journalists or restrict their access for reporting the truth. In that spirit, we express our solidarity with CNN, Politico and MS NOW, all barred from the White House this month for coverage the administration found unwelcome.
History offers a clear lesson on where the suppression of a free press leads. The dictators of the 1930s who tried to silence journalists did not have happy endings. Mussolini's fell in the streets of Milan in 1945. A free press outlives those who try to gag it, and TLF will keep reporting accordingly.
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