Frozen War

Sixty days into Operation Epic Fury, Trump says the war is over. The U.S. Navy is still in the Strait.

Trump sent Capitol Hill a letter declaring hostilities “terminated,” and then, that same night, launched Project Freedom: a Navy-escorted operation to free stranded commercial ships through the Strait of Hormuz. The framing is deliberate. If Iran fires on Project Freedom, it is not shooting at a warship. It is attacking a humanitarian mission.

Also this week: Iran has spent the ceasefire restocking, retaining roughly 70 percent of its missile and drone production capacity according to MBN reporting. In Turkey, Iran’s Quds Force has been quietly rebuilding recruitment networks. In Gaza, the American ceasefire monitoring mission is being shut down. And in Lebanon, Israeli forces are leveling villages under a plan called Operation Silver Plow while the ceasefire holds on paper.

Former United States Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides joins us this week on The Diplomat. His read: There will eventually be a nuclear deal, it will look like the Obama-era agreement, and it will be called something else entirely.

Dalshad Hussein, Yehia Kassem, and Leila Bazzi contributed to the Agenda this week. 

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Washington Signals

Project Freedom

President Donald Trump told Congress the war is over. Yet the ships, the troops, and the blockade are still there.

On May 1, the exact 60-day deadline required by the War Powers Resolution, a United States law requiring the president to seek congressional approval for military action within 60 days of its start, Trump sent Congress a letter declaring that “the hostilities that began on February 28, 2026, have terminated.” In the same letter, he acknowledged that “the threat posed by Iran to the United States and our Armed Forces remains significant.” Two carrier strike groups, more than 100 aircraft, and 15,000 troops remain in place. So does the naval blockade.

That same night, Trump announced Project Freedom on Truth Social, describing it as “a humanitarian gesture” to guide neutral commercial ships through the Strait of Hormuz. United States Central Command described its role the next morning as “supporting Project Freedom and enforcing the naval blockade on Iranian ports.” In the same sentence.

A senior White House official told MBN the framing is deliberate. “A blockade is not hostilities. Project Freedom is the humanitarian face of that pressure. Iran can either accept safe passage for neutral ships or explain to the world why it fired on an aid mission. Those are their only options.”

On Capitol Hill, the debate has not closed. Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine who broke with her party on the sixth War Powers vote, was direct: “The War Powers Act establishes a clear 60-day deadline for Congress to either authorize or end United States involvement in foreign hostilities. That deadline is not a suggestion. It is a requirement.” It was the first Republican senatorial defection on the vote, and Collins’s position as Appropriations chair makes it harder to dismiss.

Iran’s parliament has passed a Strait of Hormuz Management Plan that establishes tolls and assigns enforcement to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the branch of Iran’s military responsible for foreign operations. Military chief Ali Abdollahi warned that any United States forces entering the strait “will be attacked.” Iran’s Security and Policy Commission said American interference in the new maritime operations “will be regarded as a violation of the ceasefire.”

One detail no wire service has connected to Project Freedom: The United Arab Emirates recently left OPEC+, freeing Abu Dhabi to produce beyond the quotas that cap every other Gulf producer. Its Fujairah terminal, on the Gulf of Oman outside the Strait, gives the UAE an export route the blockade cannot touch. Washington can sustain pressure on Iranian oil without triggering a supply crisis for its Gulf partners. A Gulf diplomat told MBN: “Washington can sustain this blockade for months because Abu Dhabi can still move crude. The other Gulf capitals are watching closely, and they are not happy about being left behind.”

Iran Watch

Turkey’s Hidden Front

Since the 12-Day War in June 2025, Iran’s Quds Force, the branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps responsible for foreign operations, has been reactivating its networks inside Turkey, according to Iranian dissidents and opposition figures who spoke to MBN. The targets for recruitment include Turkish, Afghan, Pakistani, and Arab residents, offered payment in exchange for intelligence work and attacks on American, Western, and Israeli interests inside the country.

The arrests confirm the pattern. In January, Turkish authorities detained six people, including one Iranian national, on espionage charges following coordinated raids across five provinces. The suspects were accused of gathering intelligence on military bases and sensitive sites inside and outside Turkey in coordination with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps intelligence apparatus, Reuters reported.

The operation extends beyond espionage into media. On April 15, Iranian state news agency IRNA reported a meeting in the Iranian city of Tabriz between pro-Iran Turkish journalists and activists and their Iranian counterparts, aimed at building a cross-border “resistance media” network as part of Iran’s war against the United States and Israel.

Iran specialist Souran Balani told MBN that Iran’s recruitment focus in Turkey goes beyond Turkish nationals. “Iran has worked intensively to recruit refugees and residents in Turkish cities, especially Arabs, Syrians, Lebanese, Palestinians, Pakistanis, and Afghans, and has successfully recruited many of them to execute its agendas.”

Turkish political analyst Ismail Goktan told MBN that Iran cannot replicate in Turkey what it built in Iraq, Lebanon, or Syria. Most of the movements it influences define themselves as Sunni Islamists rather than Shia, which limits Tehran’s organizational reach. “Iran cannot mobilize these groups in an organized way,” he said.

The infrastructure, however, does not require formal loyalty. As Abdul Rahman Al-Haidari of the Arab Democratic National Current in Ahvaz told MBN: “Iranian influence does not always move through visible official institutions. It moves through what can be described as dormant media cells, figures, and organizations that do not officially work in Tehran’s name but move politically and through media to protect its narrative.”

Leaving the Guard

Members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard attend a military exercise of the Guard’s ground forces in the Aras region in East Azerbaijan province, Iran, October 17, 2022. Iranian Revolutionary Guard / West Asia News Agency (WANA) / handout via Reuters. Editor’s note: This image is provided by a third party.

“The commanders hide in safe areas far from the bombing, along with their families, while they throw us into the fire inside bases they know will be bombed. They use us as human shields.”

The man who said that is a major in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the ideological military force established in 1979 to protect the ruling system and export its revolution abroad. He spoke to MBN by phone after contact was established through four local intermediaries and two Iranian opposition leaders. He gave his name as Murad, a pseudonym, and said he fled his base outside Tehran two weeks ago using his son’s illness as a pretext, crossed overland into Azerbaijan with his family, and has not returned.

He is not alone. Iranian opposition leaders told MBN that thousands of Revolutionary Guard officers and soldiers have defected since the beginning of this year, driven by a combination of fear of U.S. and Israeli airstrikes, declining salaries, refusal to participate in crackdowns on protesters, and fear of internal purges. Defectors have settled primarily in Azerbaijan, Armenia, Turkey, and Afghanistan, with others hiding inside Iran in cities other than their own.

The purges are running alongside the defections. Kurdish political activist Jamil Ahmadi, who is based in Europe and tracks the Guard’s internal dynamics, told MBN that those who cannot leave and those caught trying to flee have faced arrest, secret execution, and in some cases the detention of their families. “The Guard’s intelligence, particularly its hardline wing, began wide-ranging investigations with detained officers,” Qassem Abd, a leader in the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahvaz, told MBN.

Murad described the trigger for his own decision to flee: A unit from Guard intelligence arrested 20 of his colleagues on espionage charges after they complained about food conditions and the treatment of personnel during the war. “I feared being next,” he said.

Observers of Iranian affairs who spoke to MBN point to one more factor: the death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in a joint U.S.-Israeli strike in March, and the absence of his designated successor, Mojtaba Khamenei, from public view. The Guard has been tied to the Supreme Leader’s authority since its founding. Without a visible leader, the institution holding it together is showing the strain.

Read the full story here

Levant Signals

Two Fronts, No Answers

Board of Peace initiative at the World Economic Forum. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse

The Gaza ceasefire is holding — but only just. Reuters has reported exclusively that the Civil-Military Coordination Center, the American mission established to monitor the ceasefire and coordinate aid into Gaza, is being shut down and its functions transferred to a new body. Seven diplomats told Reuters the move amounts to closing the center entirely. The White House and United States Central Command declined to defend the mission’s work on the record, referring all questions to the Board of Peace, the international body overseeing Gaza’s reconstruction plan.”

Board of Peace envoy Nikolay Mladenov acknowledged the difficulty plainly. “We’ve had some very serious discussions with Hamas over the last few weeks. They’re not easy.” His warning to Hamas on the social media platform X was sharper: “He who will not cross the river will drown in the sea.” The ultimatum that followed expired. No agreement came.

The deadlock remains. Hamas, the armed group that controls Gaza, will only discuss giving up its weapons after a full Israeli withdrawal and guarantees of a Palestinian state. Israel will not withdraw until Hamas disarms first. A senior Israeli security source told Israeli broadcaster Kan: “If Hamas does not disarm itself, the Israeli military will return to fighting in Gaza in the near future.”

A senior State Department official told MBN the window is closing. “The ultimatum expired. The river-crossing warning was not rhetorical. If Hamas does not move in the coming days, the Israeli security source who spoke to Kan will be proven right.”

In Lebanon, the ceasefire exists only on paper. Israel has been conducting multiple airstrikes daily. Lebanese officials say 14 people were killed in a single day last Sunday. Hezbollah, the Lebanese armed group backed by Iran, has continued drone strikes on Israeli troops. Israeli soldiers told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that their operations in southern Lebanon, under a plan called Operation Silver Plow, are focused on systematically leveling buildings in Lebanese villages, with units assigned quotas for homes destroyed.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel is not leaving: “We are conducting negotiations with Lebanon because we are very strong.” Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz warned last week that “fire will break out and engulf the cedars of Lebanon” if Hezbollah continued its defiance, in a statement issued by his office during a meeting with United Nations Special Coordinator for Lebanon Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert.

No American official has publicly responded to the Israeli statements about resuming the fighting in Gaza. No American official has gone on record defending the closed mission. The White House has not responded to Israeli ministers discussing renewed fighting.

Featured Conversation

Reading the New Map

A few Americans have argued with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as directly as Tom Nides, and fewer still have kept his ear. He served as U.S. Ambassador to Israel under former President Joe Biden. Today, he is Vice Chairman at Blackstone. Editor-in-Chief Leila Bazzi and I spoke with him in New York about Israel, the Iran deal, and who is actually redrawing the Middle East. His read on the new Middle East is not optimistic. But it is specific.

On Netanyahu’s fixation on Iran: “You go into his personal office and on the wall is a map not of Israel, but of Iran. His view has been that Iran has been a threat to the state of Israel and to the region, as has been proven out by the current situation.”

On where the Iran nuclear deal ends up: “I think ultimately there will be another deal, and it will look very similar to the deal that President Barack Obama did with the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.) It won’t be called that. It will be called some other Trump agreement, the best agreement ever. But at the end of the day, you’re going to have to have an agreement.”

On Ben-Gvir and Smotrich: “Ben-Gvir is a thug. Smotrich’s role in pushing for settlement expansion is, to me, terrible. It’s terrible for Israel, certainly terrible for the Palestinian people, certainly terrible for the idea of ever having a two-state solution.”

Watch the full conversation on The Diplomat here