The bog of war: week five begins

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0:32Gregg Carlstrom:The Economist

0:39Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Rosie Blore.

0:44Gregg Carlstrom:And I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

0:53As part of our history series on America at 250, we move on to the next chapter in its growth as a nation. Despite being the world's leading industrial power, America started closing its borders to migrants and looking overseas for new opportunities.

1:10Gregg Carlstrom:And as more and more cinema seats stay empty, many people think the genre that might fill them back up is science fiction. We take a look at Project Hail Mary as one film that's rightly leading the charge in what some are calling the year of sci-fi.

1:31But first...

1:40The war with Iran has entered its fifth week, with little prospect of an end. Few think that any kind of talks will lead to a deal. There are suggestions that America might deploy thousands of troops on the ground. And in a further sign of escalation over the weekend, the Houthis, Yemen's Shia militia that's aligned with Iran, launched missiles at southern Israel. The longer the war drags on, the greater the consequences for all sides.

2:11Jason Palmer:We're getting to a point where each party to this war might start to overplay its hand. Greg Karlstrom is our Middle East correspondent. Iran has an opportunity now to end the war on somewhat favorable terms, but it doesn't seem interested in doing that. Donald Trump, looking for a sort of victory image, might deploy ground troops to Iran, which is going to plunge him into this sort of prolonged conflict that he once railed against as a candidate. And Israel, while it's happy to keep fighting for now, may end up causing deep damage to its most important relationship, the one with the United States.

2:50And Greg, we've heard a lot over the weekend about the involvement of Houthis. Just tell us what's going on there.

2:57Jason Palmer:So this is, of course, the Iranian-backed Shia militia in Yemen that controls a large part of Yemen. They've sat on the sidelines for a month, but over the weekend, they did fire ballistic missiles at Israel. The question now for everyone in the region is, are they going to go further than that? Firing missiles at Israel, yes, it puts some pressure on Israel's interceptor stocks, But it doesn't change the course of the war in any great way. If the Houthis go back to carrying out attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea, as they did two years ago during the Gaza war, the impact of that would be much more serious.

3:36Jason Palmer:Saudi Arabia right now, instead of exporting from the Persian Gulf, which is blocked, is exporting this oil from the Red Sea. If the Houthis start attacking ships again, tankers are not going to be able to collect that Saudi oil. And so what is now a 10 million barrel a day shortfall in oil markets will end up being closer to 20 million. That would have a huge impact, obviously, on the oil price. But we just don't know yet if Houthis are going to do that if they are waiting for the conflict to escalate, to escalate their own actions, or if this is as far as they're willing to go because they don't want to antagonize the Saudis too much.

4:16So leaving the Houthis aside then, let's take the other actors in this conflict. Iran, how is the regime holding up? How is the country holding up?

4:26Jason Palmer:The view in Tehran right now, I think, is that they have the upper hand in this war. That is their assessment. They've been able to keep up missile and drone attacks on Israel and the Gulf States for more than a month now. They have this de facto control of the Strait of Hormuz. They've driven up the oil price. They've choked off commercial shipping. And at the same time, the damage that they have suffered inside of Iran is still largely limited to military and nuclear targets. We haven't seen, I think, catastrophic damage to their economy or to their infrastructure. and in fact they're still exporting oil and making more money now from oil exports than they were before the war.

5:08Jason Palmer:And so all of this is feeding into their calculus but I think a few caveats there. One is that there's a lot that we don't know about the scale of the damage in Iran and we've also seen occasional attacks on things that are very very important to its economy. On Friday Israel bombed the largest steel plants in the country at least one of which subsequently shut down And if we see more of these sorts of attacks, if Israel and perhaps America start striking more at Iranian infrastructure, at Iran's economy, they're going to cause damage that is going to be very hard for Iran to repair and is going to have very serious consequences for its economy.

5:46So what do you think would bring Iran to the table? How would they want the war to end?

5:52Jason Palmer:Soterios Johnson Ideally, what they want is to know that not just this war is ending, but that there won't be a future war. They want guarantees that both America and Israel are not going to attack them again. I think that's their core demand here. Now, they've issued a list of other demands, which they want to see in a ceasefire. They want reparations for the war. They want the closure of American military bases in the region. They want to formalize their control over the Strait of Hormuz, which is an international waterway, but they want to start charging fees for ships that use the strait. It's very hard to imagine Trump agreeing to these things.

6:31Jason Palmer:America's allies in the Gulf would be very strongly opposed. And so Iran has an opportunity here where I think they could sell a deal to the Americans, a much pared down version of that deal. They would reopen the Strait of Hormuz. They would get some sanctions relief in return. They might make a few other concessions. And they could say, you know, we'll have talks in the future about the rest of America's demands, knowing that those talks may never happen. But that's not where Iran is right now. And where is Washington in all of this as the war enters its fifth week? I mean, you hear very mixed messages coming from people in the Trump administration.

7:08Jason Palmer:On the one hand, they continue to talk up these diplomatic contacts they've had with Iran, I don't even want to call them indirect talks, but messages they have passed back and forth via Pakistan, which is serving as an intermediary. I don't think they've made much progress towards a deal, but there seems to be a desire to find a deal and to extricate America from this war because of the damage it has already done to the global economy. The war is deeply unpopular in America. I think Trump would like to find an off-ramp here. But if he can't find one soon, I think it's going to be politically difficult for him to sell this sort of half-done agreement as a victory.

7:51Jason Palmer:So the longer this goes on, the more Trump is going to be pushed towards escalatory measures up to and including possible ground invasion of Iran. And how likely is it that we'll see troops on the ground in Iran? I think it's becoming quite likely. The Pentagon has already deployed 7 ,000 marines and paratroopers to the region. There's talk that another 10 ,000 troops might be sent. There are amphibious warfare ships making their way west from California right now. I think there's a strong possibility that the US tries to capture some of the islands at the mouth of the Strait of Hormuz and use them as a base to defend ships coming in and out of the strait.

8:33Jason Palmer:The riskier things that Trump could do would be trying to seize Khark Island, which is the site of Iran's main oil export terminal, trying to carry out a very complicated, very protracted raid inside of Iran to seize its stockpiles of highly enriched uranium. The administration has talked about these things, but they are much riskier and much more complicated. We don't know if he's going to order those sorts of operations. But again, I do think it's likely that there will be some sort of ground invasion coming in the days and weeks to come. Which doesn't really sound like an end to the war. No, none of these will end the war.

9:11Jason Palmer:The administration is hoping that somehow this will be a knockout blow to Iran. If you seize some islands, then they won't be able to blockade the Straits anymore or they'll make a deal and the war will be over. If they don't make a deal, first, whatever territory you seize, you either have to hold it or you have to give it back to Iran, which is very embarrassing. So you're sort of stuck occupying this territory for a prolonged period of time. Even if you take these islands at the mouth of the strait, it's still difficult to convince commercial shippers that it's safe to go through because Iran can continue firing drones and missiles at ships from the mainland.

9:48Jason Palmer:And so America may have to hold this territory for a protracted period of time. If there are significant American casualties in any of these ground operations, that might add further political pressure on Trump to escalate, to send more troops, to pull himself even further in. So a president who once said he's against forever wars in the Middle East, he's against large deployments of American troops in the Middle East, he's starting something that may end with exactly that sort of scenario. Greg, thank you very much for talking to me. Thank you, Rosie.

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12:22Gregg Carlstrom:In July, America will be celebrating its 250th birthday. So, in the run-up to the anniversary, we're charting the big moments in the country's history, taking extracts from our own archive to recount the history as it happened.

12:47By the 1890s, the United States had overtaken Britain as the world's leading industrial power.

12:53Gregg Carlstrom:Annie Cravel is a senior digital editor. All this growth was financed by Wall Street. But most of the prosperity was concentrated with a few successful businessmen, including John Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. It was also a key time for investigative journalists. Ida Tarbell revealed Rockefeller's corruption in a series of articles, writing, Very often people who admit the facts, who are willing to see that Mr. Rockefeller has employed force and fraud to secure his ends, justify him by declaring its business. That is, its business has come to be a legitimate excuse for hard dealing, sly tricks, special privileges.

13:37American workers labored for long hours in unsafe conditions to make those at the top rich. They began to organize. On May 1st, 1886, there was a turning point. Thousands of angry workers organized a strike for an eight-hour workday. A few days later, at a protest rally in Chicago's Haymarket Square, There, someone threw a bomb at police, who then fired on protesters. At least 11 people were killed. These events set off anti-labor and anti-immigrant hysteria, but they eventually became a symbol of labor's struggle, with May Day acquiring global meaning. Anti-immigrant sentiment had been on the rise for a while before the first May Day.

14:32During the Civil War, Congress had opened America's doors wide to immigrants. There were Irish and Germans, and later Eastern and Southern Europeans, as well as East Asians. Every economic shock inspired a backlash against them. They were accused of taking American jobs. And by 1924, Congress had virtually barred migrants from outside the Americas. Ironically, the Statue of Liberty, which is meant to welcome all comers, was erected around the time America began closing its borders.

15:16Black people continued to be poorly treated, too. The problem after the end of slavery became segregation. In 1892, Homer Plessy, from New Orleans, was arrested after he sat down in a train car reserved for white passengers. He appealed his case all the way up to the Supreme Court, where the justices ruled against him. Justice John Marshall Harlan, the only dissenter, wrote,

15:55But his words did not resonate. The court's decision only served to reinforce the regime of segregation that had been imposed by white Southerners after Reconstruction. We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff's argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it. At the same time, America was making new strides abroad. In the 1890s, America's armies had run out of parts of the continent to conquer.

16:40Instead, in 1898, America drove Spain out of Cuba and Puerto Rico. And on the other side of the world, America's navy took the Philippines and Guam from Spain. That, ironically, made America a colonial power with 10 million subjects.

17:01Gregg Carlstrom:The great fundamental issue now before our people in the state history, It is, are the American people fit to govern themselves, to rule themselves, to control them? I believe they are. My opponents do not. I believe in the right of the people to it. In 1901, Teddy Roosevelt came to power after the assassination of the previous president, William McKinley. Under the new president, a rotund and mustachioed man, expansionism grew. The Economist, at the time, wrote... The record of Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, who under the Constitution becomes president until March 1905, as politician, as soldier in the Spanish War, and as governor of New York, is acknowledged to be most excellent.

17:53But there is an impression that he is unusually masterful, that he is inclined to jingoism, that he holds to the policy known as that of the Monroe Doctrine with extreme tenacity, and that he is especially antagonistic to Great Britain. Roosevelt also flexed his muscles at home, clashing with big business. The press called him the trust buster. But he proved weak in the face of a financial crisis in 1907 when a group of bankers, led by J.P. Morgan, agreed to provide emergency liquidity. President Roosevelt fell silent in his criticism. These events would eventually lead to the creation of a central bank, modernizing America's financial system.

18:46For all the change, modernization only went so far. Under Roosevelt, immigration restrictions became tighter, and segregation more entrenched. We'll see you back next time for our next chapter, Liberalism Under Siege.

19:21During COVID, we saw a drift away from cinema and people started to watch everything on their phones or on their televisions at home. but it's the film lineup that will bring people back. And we're seeing that happen now in spades.

19:36Gregg Carlstrom:Alexandra Sewitch-Bass is our culture editor. 2026 is expected to be a really exciting year. And it's not just for the reasons you'd expect of big franchises with characters people are familiar with. In fact, we're seeing a lot of original films come out in the sci-fi genre. Some people have even called 2026 the year of sci-fi with more than 20 big titles releasing. If you found out we weren't alone. One from Steven Spielberg with UFOs. Would that frighten you? Good morning. The more I fight. We have a new Dune and, of course, a Star Wars.

20:22And so it's a very exciting time if you're a sci-fi fan. And even if you don't consider yourself one, you might be drawn to the cinema. And that's perhaps why Project Hail Mary is sweeping the box office.