VIEW Investors react to US attack on Iran nuclear sites
June 21 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump on Saturday said that a "very successful attack" on three nuclear sites in Iran had been carried out. In a posting on Truth Social, Trump added, "All planes are safely on their way home" and he ended his posting saying, "Now is the time for peace."
Following are comments from some financial and corporate analysts:
JAMIE COX, MANAGING PARTNER, HARRIS FINANCIAL GROUP, RICHMOND, VIRGINIA:
'Oil is sure to spike on this initial news, but will likely level in a few days. With this demonstration of force and total annihilation of its nuclear capabilities, they've lost all of their leverage and will likely hit the escape button to a peace deal."
MARK MALEK, CHIEF INVESTMENT OFFICER, SIEBERT FINANCIAL, NYC:
"I think it's going to be very positive for the stock market. I believe that on Friday if you'd asked me, I would have expected two weeks of volatility with markets trying to analyze every drib and drab of information coming out of the White House and I would have said that it would have been better to make a decision last week.
"So this will be reassuring, especially since it seems like a one and done situation and not as if (the US) is seeking a long, drawn out conflict. The biggest risk still out there is the Strait of Hormuz. It could certainly change everything if Iran has the capability to close it."
JACK ABLIN, CHIEF INVESTMENT OFFICER OF CRESSET CAPITAL:
"This adds a complicated new layer of risk that we'll have to consider and pay attention to... This is definitely going to have an impact on energy prices and potentially on inflation as well."
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The Guardian
11 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘This friend of ours will soon be an enemy': how Iran became Israel's foe
With the US now in open warfare with Iran in a long-heralded conflict triggered by fear for Israel's existence, it is worth recalling the prescience of the Israeli spy in Tehran who saw it all coming. As the Mossad station chief in Tehran in the late 1970s, Reuven Merhav was the Israeli foreign espionage agency's man on the ground charged with safeguarding Israel's sensitive intelligence relationship with its closest Middle East ally, Iran under the rule of its pro-western monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In a scenario that throws the current state of warfare between the two nations into sharp relief, Israel and Iran had fostered close ties since the Jewish state's founding in 1948. But a March 1978 visit to the Persian Gulf island of Kish – then a hedonistic playground for Iran's rich and well-connected – along with the Israeli ambassador, Uri Lubrani, convinced Merhav that the shah's rein was crumbling and the precious strategic partnership imperiled. With discontent rumbling and opposition protests gathering pace, the two men encountered a monarch and intelligence agents complacent and detached from the gathering storm. The pair communicated their forebodings to their Mossad and foreign ministry bosses in Israel – only to be met by skepticism and disbelief, a feeling shared by the CIA in Washington when the same warnings were relayed to it. Weeks later, as Merhav prepared to leave Tehran at the end of his tour of duty, he had some cautionary words for his successor. 'I'm worried that this friend of ours will soon be an enemy,' Merhav told him as described by Ronen Bergman in his 2008 book, The Secret War With Iran. 'I'm giving you Iran with a time fuse.' It was an eerily prescient forecast. Within months, Iran was consumed with revolutionary fervor. Chaos and upheaval unfolded on the streets. As his power base quickly collapsed, the shah – so recently thought by western allies to be unassailable – fled abroad with his family in January 1979. Weeks later, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a radical Shia cleric, returned from Paris after years in exile, to take power and turn Iran into an Islamic state. He immediately severed all ties with Israel. With revolutionaries storming the Israeli embassy, the country's remaining diplomats were forced to flee, lucky to escape Iran with their lives. Thus began a deadly ideological enmity between two countries that had been allies, shared no common border and harbored no territorial claims against each other – and which has now spiralled into open war and, last night, dragged in the United States with consequences that may transform the geopolitical map, after Donald Trump announced that the US had bombed three Iranian nuclear facilities in Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan. With the US's entry into the conflict on Israel's side, Merhav's gloomy forecast has now acquired graver dimensions than perhaps even he foresaw. More than three decades after he first made them, I had an improbably serendipitous encounter with Merhav on a train from Hamburg in Germany to Prague, the Czech capital. Having entered my compartment after getting on the train at Berlin, the elderly man sitting opposite noticed my reading material and asked if I was reading Arabic. I told him it was Farsi, which I was attempting to learn, in the hope that I might one day be allowed back into Iran. I had been the Guardian's correspondent in Tehran several years earlier, but had been forced to leave Iran in late 2007 after the authorities refused to renew my residence permit, apparently due to objections over my reporting. But the intensity of the experience had kept my interest in the country – and hopes of returning – alive. The man replied that he spoke Farsi, in which we then attempted to converse, with limited success before reverting to English as it became clear that his fluency in the language far exceeded mine. He explained that he was Israeli and had worked in the embassy in Tehran before the revolution. He introduced himself as Reuven – at which my eyes widened in sudden recognition. I had read Bergman's vivid account of Merhav's grim warnings and the subsequent evacuation of Israelis from Tehran months earlier. It left a lasting impression. Now I was in the company of the main protagonist. He sidestepped my question about the book's description of him as Mossad's man in Tehran, confirming only that he worked for Israel's foreign ministry, but acknowledged knowing Bergman and his work. There was no doubt that the stranger on the train was Merhav, a fact confirmed by subsequent Google searches and one Israeli foreign ministry official I later asked. The chance encounter added context and meaning to events I had witnessed first-hand as the Guardian's correspondent. Much of what happened then explains why the two countries are locked in combat now. To be in Tehran then was to be a witness to what turns out to have been a long prelude to the current warfare – as tensions between Iran and Israel escalated. Nearly every night during spring and summer, I could hear living proof of the enmity that Merhav had predicted from the balcony of my rented house in north Tehran as youthful chants of marg bar Israeel (death to Israel) and marg bar Amrika (death to America) emanated from what seemed to be a nearby training camp for the Basij, a volunteer militia run by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Both slogans had been absorbed into the fabric of Iran's revolutionary landscape. They could be seen emblazoned on buildings and were a staple chant at Friday prayers. 'Death to Israel' was even graffitied in a section of Isfahan's Naqsh-e Jahan Square, a Unesco world heritage site. Israel and Iran had been locked in shadow hostilities for years – with Tehran suspected of masterminding deadly attacks on Israeli and Jewish installations in Argentina and backing Hezbollah in Lebanon – when I arrived in Iran in early 2005. But it was after the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president in June of that year that the ante was dramatically raised. At a conference in Tehran in October, Ahmadinejad, a populist who promoted himself as a champion of the marginalized and underprivileged, stoked international outrage with a comment that was interpreted as calling for Israel 'to be wiped off the map', although other translations offered less incendiary forms of words. Apparently revelling in the notoriety, the president followed up by calling the Holocaust 'a myth'. Worse followed. The following year, Iran's biggest-selling newspaper, Hamshahri, staged the results of a cartoon contest to lampoon history's worst genocide at Tehran's Palestine Contemporary Art Museum. The most egregious instance of Israel-baiting came in December 2006, when the Iranian foreign ministry staged what it called a 'scientific' conference purporting to prove that the murder of 6 million Jews had not happened. The event draw a rogue's gallery of holocaust deniers and antisemites, among them David Duke, a former imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and future supporter of Donald Trump, who praised Iran for allowing 'free speech' and denounced Israel as 'a terrorist state'. It was, on many levels, a sickening spectacle, both for its unsavoury catalogue of attendees and the brazen assault on truth, with some exhibits purporting to show that allied forces, rather than the Nazis, were responsible for wartime atrocities. 'The biggest turning point was Ahmadinejad being elected and then denying the Holocaust,' said Meir Javedanfar, an Iranian-born Israeli scholar, who teaches Iran studies at Reichman University, near Tel Aviv. 'Iranians lose their mind if somebody calls the Persian Gulf the Arabian Gulf. Yet they fail to understand what kind of emotions it creates in Israelis when somebody says the Holocaust is a myth.' The insult was compounded by growing Israeli suspicions that Iran was trying to build an atomic bomb. The existence of a hitherto secret Iranian nuclear project, in the form of a uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz, had been disclosed by the opposition Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) movement in 2002. Enrichment activities were subsequently suspended by the then reformist president, Mohammad Khatami, as a confidence-building measure as western powers exerted pressure. Ahmadinejad ordered the program's resumption, stridently asserting Iran's nuclear 'rights' and sending international tensions soaring while elevating Israeli fears to fever pitch. 'You have somebody who denies the Holocaust, they're developing nuclear program, they're supporting Hezbollah – Iran took on a new form in terms of threats,' said Javedanfar. Israel's preoccupation with Iran's nuclear activities underscored how dramatically the relationship between the two one-time allies had been transformed by the fall of the shah, historians say. 'One of Iran's most important allies in the shah's pursuit of a nuclear program in the last decade of his rule was Israel,' said Abbas Milani, director of Iranian studies at Stanford University and a biographer of the shah. 'There are published reports of cooperation between Iran, Israel and South Africa in the last decade of his rule.' The shah, said Milani, saw Israel as a 'strategic ally', a view enhanced by the two countries shared suspicions of Arab nationalism, as embodied by the Egyptian leader, Abdel Gamal Nasser. 'The shah was a realist. He realized Israel is there to stay and it controlled his enemies.' Jews, meanwhile, felt relatively secure in Iran. 'Iran has had long history of very good relations with its own Jewish population,' said Milani. 'It had largest Jewish population of any Muslim country at that time. There were maybe 150,000 at the time of the revolution.' That, too, was transformed by the shah's downfall. The onset of the Islamic regime – bringing with it a climate of fierce anti-Zionism – prompted a mass exodus of Iranian Jews, many of them eventually moving to Israel. In the early 1980s, with Iran embroiled in a bitter attritional war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Israel attempted a rapprochement. Fearing a Saddam victory at least as much as Khomeini's regime, it sent weapons to Iranian forces, helping them to stave off defeat. The Iranians gladly accepted the weapons – but resisted any attempts at restoring the friendship. 'I've spoken to Israelis who served in Iran in the embassy before the revolution and afterwards dealt with Iran,' said Javedanfar. 'They bent over backwards trying to reach out to the regime. They even lobbied the Americans' – who, under President Ronald Reagan, funneled their own weapons to Iran through Israel in an attempt to win the release of US hostages in Lebanon, an initiative that ended in the Iran-Contra scandal. 'It wasn't just for the love of Iran. They had shared interests, but they really wanted to re-establish relations with this regime. But at the end, they found out that the weapons they were giving to Iran to fire at the Iraqis were being transferred to Hezbollah and being fired at Israelis. 'Iran did not want to have any rapprochement with Israel. It was impossible.' Yet unwillingness to mend fences may not have devolved into deadly enmity without the obduracy of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who became supreme leader after Khomeini's death in 1989 Khamenei exuded a greater commitment to Israel's destruction than his predecessor, calling the country a 'cancer' on the Middle East. At a 1991 conference, organised at a time when Israelis and the Palestine Liberation Organisation were embarking on negotiations in Madrid, the supreme leader sided with factions opposed to a peace deal with Israel – a position at odds with Iran's president at the time, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. The result was an intensification of a proxy war that Iran had previously waged haphazardly, through Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas. The latter group embarked on a spate of suicide bombings that killed scores of Israelis and contributed, in 1996, to the election of the hardline Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel's prime minister, as faith waned in the Oslo peace accords signed three years earlier. There were domestic and foreign policy reasons for Khamenei's anti-Israel crusade. 'After the fall of the Soviet Union, he saw an opening in the Middle East for a new kind of superpower, an Islamic one, so he wanted to take that chance,' Javedanfar said. 'But it also served the economic interests of his allies, because there's billions of dollars to be made in keeping Iran isolated. That allows them complete monopoly over all sectors of Iran's economy, from making tomato puree to cars. And one of the ways to make sure Iran always stayed isolated and western companies did not invest was to continue the anti-Israel line.' Milani argues that Khamenei's animus has even deeper roots in anti-Jewish prejudice, displayed in commentary he provided to In the Shade of the Qur'an, a book by the Egyptian revolutionary and Islamic Brotherhood leader Sayyid Qutb which he translated into Farsi. 'Many people, even within the regime itself, have asked why this is in the national interest, why do you think the destruction of the state of Israel is your responsibility?' he said. 'The rhetoric and the reality of the policy of anti-Zionism is part of why Khamenei does it, but I think it is also an element of antisemitism.' 'Khamenei thinks Israel today is the same, or even worse than, those [Jews] who fought Muhammad at Medina. When you have that kind of antisemitic thinking guiding you, you can't befriend Israel.' It is a minority view among Iranians, most of whom do not view Israel as an existential enemy and would accept normalized relations, says Milani. Soaring non-combatant casualties or massive damage to Iran's civilian infrastructure resulting from prolonged Israeli bombardment could test such a rosy view, and instead deepen the enmity that Merhav foresaw nearly half a century ago. For now, Milani puts the onus on Khamenei, whom he accuses of failing to live up to years of rhetorical bellicosity when it mattered. 'His devotion to the notion that 'death to Israel' must be part of every ritual of politics in Iran, then putting the country on the path of war, being absolutely unprepared for it when war is imminent is just criminal negligence,' he said. 'To have all of this rhetoric and then to be so unprepared when Israel initially attacked – it's just remarkable.'
Daily Mail
15 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Major US cities go on high alert following Trump's military strike on Iran
Cities across the United States are on high alert following Donald Trump 's airstrikes on three nuclear cites in Iran. The president addressed the nation late Saturday and called the attack a 'spectacular military success,' stating that Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities 'have been completely and totally obliterated.' Trump deployed B-2 stealth bombers to take out Iran's key Fordow bunker, Natanz and Esfahan sites. He issued a doomsday warning to Iran if they don't immediately run to the negotiating table to make peace with Israel. Iran's foreign minister called the strikes 'outrageous' and said that Tehran 'reserves all options' to retaliate. After Trump's announcement, police in New York City and Washington DC revealed they increasing their presence amid fears of a retaliatory attack. The New York City Police Department said in a post to X: 'We're tracking the situation unfolding in Iran. 'Out of an abundance of caution, we're deploying additional resources to religious, cultural, and diplomatic sites across NYC and coordinating with our federal partners. We'll continue to monitor for any potential impact to NYC.' Not long after that post, the Metropolitan Police Department also released a similar statement. It said: 'The Metropolitan Police Department is closely monitoring the events in Iran. 'We are actively coordinating with our local, state, and federal law enforcement partners to share information and monitor intelligence in order to help safeguard residents, businesses, and visitors in the District of Columbia.' Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass posted to X saying the city was 'closely monitoring any threats to public safety.' She added: 'There are no known credible threats at this time and out of an abundance of caution, LAPD is stepping up patrols near places of worship, community gathering spaces and other sensitive sites. 'We will remain vigilant in protecting our communities.' Paul Mauro, a former NYPD Inspector who monitored terror cells in the city, told Fox News that police presence will be increased outside religious intuitions. '[NYPD] will put out special attention patrol cars at locations that could track to the conflict in places that have an Israeli connection, and there's a couple of Shia mosques - Iran, is Shia - and there are a couple of Shia mosques,' Mauro said. He also noted authorities will be monitoring online for any bad actors that could be plotting against the US. 'You never know what's going to develop. So [they'll] liaise with those communities. They'll talk to them, they'll put special patrol, special attention patrol,' said Mauro. 'You're going to look very closely online. You're going to be monitoring a lot of the online stuff. NYPD has a very robust cyber counterterrorism program, and you're going to do that very heavily.'
The Independent
37 minutes ago
- The Independent
Here's how Iran could retaliate after US strikes on its nuclear program
Iran has spent decades building multi-tiered military capabilities at home and across the region that were at least partly aimed at deterring the United States from attacking it. By entering Israel 's war, the U.S. may have removed the last rationale for holding them in reserve. Thet could mean a wave of attacks on U.S. forces in the Middle East, an attempt to close a key bottleneck for global oil supplies or a dash to develop a nuclear weapon with what remains of Iran's disputed program after American strikes on three key sites. A decision to retaliate against the U.S. and its regional allies would give Iran a far larger target bank and one that is much closer than Israel, allowing it to potentially use its missiles and drones to greater effect. The U.S. and Israel have far superior capabilities, but those haven't always proven decisive in America's recent history of military interventions in the region. Ever since Israel started the war with a suprise bombardment of Iran's military and nuclear sites on June 13, Iranian officials from the supreme leader on down have warned the U.S. to stay out, saying it would have dire consequences for the entire region. It should soon be clear whether those were empty threats or a grim forecast. Here's a look at what Iran's next move might be. Targeting the Strait of Hormuz The Strait of Hormuz is the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf, through which some 20% of all oil traded globally passes, and at its narrowest point it is just 33 kilometers (21 miles) wide. Any disruption there could send oil prices soaring worldwide and hit American pocketbooks. Iran boasts a fleet of fast-attack boats and thousands of naval mines that could potentially make the strait impassable, at least for a time. It could also fire missiles from its long Persian Gulf shore, as its allies, Yemen's Houthi rebels, have done in the Red Sea. The U.S., with its 5th Fleet stationed in nearby Bahrain, has long pledged to uphold freedom of navigation in the strait and would respond with far superior forces. But even a relatively brief firefight could paralyze shipping traffic and spook investors, causing oil prices to spike and generating international pressure for a ceasefire. Attacking US bases and allies in the region The U.S. has tens of thousands of troops stationed in the region, including at permanent bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, Arab Gulf countries just across the Persian Gulf from Iran — and much closer than Israel. Those bases boast the same kinds of sophisticated air defenses as Israel, but would have much less warning time before waves of missiles or swarms of armed drones. And even Israel, which is several hundred kilometers (miles) further away, has been unable to stop all of the incoming fire. Iran could also choose to attack key oil and gas facilities in those countries with the goal of exacting a higher price for U.S. involvement in the war. A drone attack on two major oil sites in Saudi Arabia in 2019 — claimed by the Houthis but widely blamed on Iran — briefly cut the kingdom's oil production in half. Activating regional allies Iran's so-called Axis of Resistance — a network of militant groups across the Middle East, is a shadow of what it was before the war ignited by Hamas' Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel out of the Gaza Strip — but it still has some formidable capabilities. Israel's 20-month war in Gaza has severely diminished the Palestinian Hamas and Islamic Jihad groups, and Israel mauled Lebanon's Hezbollah last fall, killing most of its top leadership and devastating much of southern Lebanon, making its involvement unlikely. But Iran could still call on the Houthis, who had threatened to resume their attacks in the Red Sea if the U.S. entered the war, and allied militias in Iraq. Both have drone and missile capabilities that would allow them to target the United States and its allies. Iran could also seek to respond through militant attacks further afield, as it is widely accused of doing in the 1990s with an attack on a Jewish community center in Argentina that was blamed on Iran and Hezbollah. A sprint toward nuclear arms It could be days or weeks before the full impact of the U.S. strikes on Iran's nuclear sites is known. But experts have long warned that even joint U.S. and Israeli strikes would only delay Iran's ability to develop a weapon, not eliminate it. That's because Iran has dispersed its program across the country to several sites, including hardened, underground facilities. Iran would likely struggle to repair or reconstitute its nuclear program while Israeli and U.S. warplanes are circling overhead. But it could still decide to fully end its cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency and abandon the the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. North Korea announced its withdrawal from the treaty in 2003 and tested a nuclear weapon three years later, but it had the freedom to develop its program without punishing airstrikes. Iran insists its program is peaceful, though it is the only non-nuclear-armed state to enrich uranium up to 60%, a short, technical step away from weapons-grade levels of 90%. U.S. intelligence agencies and the IAEA assess Iran hasn't had an organized military nuclear program since 2003. Israel is widely believed to be the only nuclear-armed state in the Middle East but does not acknowledge having such weapons. ___ Gambrell reported from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
