Iran War Costs: Spirit Airlines Liquidates, 17,000 Jobs Lost

The bill for the third month of the US-Israeli war on Iran arrived in America on Saturday. The UN World Food Programme warned that another 45 million people will be pushed into acute food insecurity by June if the conflict is not over by then, raising the global hungry total to 363 million — above the spike that followed Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The agency's 2030 hunger-eradication target, the WFP said, has been knocked off course; the war is also redrawing political loyalties and producing economic winners alongside the much larger group of losers.

At home, the most concrete impact of the same war was the wind-down of Spirit Airlines. The carrier announced an immediate liquidation, cancelling all flights, after Trump-administration rescue talks collapsed and jet fuel prices more than doubled across two months of war. Spirit, which had filed for bankruptcy twice in 2025, said it could not raise the hundreds of millions of dollars in additional liquidity it needed; the shutdown, costing about 17,000 jobs, is the first liquidation of a major US airline in two decades.

On Capitol Hill and in allied capitals, the Pentagon was again the bearer of bad news. The United States warned the United Kingdom, Poland, Lithuania and Estonia to expect significant delays in scheduled weapons deliveries — including ammunition for HIMARS and NASAMS — as the Defense Department races to refill stockpiles drawn down by the Iran campaign. Nine people familiar with the matter told the Financial Times the lags reflect real shortages rather than a political shift, and a senior Ukrainian official said deliveries to Kyiv had already begun to slip.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth faced bipartisan criticism in a Senate hearing over a roughly $1.5 trillion FY2027 budget proposal that excludes new Ukraine aid; the Pentagon released $400 million in already-appropriated assistance last week under pressure from Senator Mitch McConnell. China's UN ambassador Fu Cong said the same day that maintaining the Iran ceasefire and reopening the Strait of Hormuz would dominate President Trump's upcoming visit to Beijing if the strait remains closed. Israeli airstrikes meanwhile killed at least 18 people in the southern Lebanese villages of Habbouche, Choukine and Zrariyé despite a 17 April ceasefire with Hezbollah, and Iran warned of renewed US hostilities.

Inside the White House, the administration turned a foiled assassination attempt into political leverage. The Justice Department filed an emergency motion arguing the attempt — with a man arrested less than 72 hours earlier for trying to kill Trump at the White House — proved the urgency of a new White House ballroom that a federal judge had ordered halted. The filing came in a week that also produced an indictment of former FBI director James Comey and an accelerated FCC review of ABC licences after a late-night host's joke about Melania Trump. It also compounded a separate late-April incident at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner, where Trump was evacuated and a suspect identified as Cole Tomas Allen of Torrance, California, was taken into custody armed with a shotgun, a handgun and multiple knives.

The US-Israel war entered its third month at the start of May with no end in sight; aid agencies have asked for a humanitarian corridor through the Strait of Hormuz; and the Wall Street Journal reported that the conflict has exposed gaps in US defence systems, with Iranian drones challenging elements of the THAAD system and damaging radar infrastructure in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates — handing China, Russia and North Korea valuable intelligence on US capabilities.