Wars Wind Down as Washington Pushes Allies to Carry More

The Iran war moved toward an uneasy close on Sunday without resolving. Iranian state media disclosed a draft informal "Islamabad understanding" with Washington on Strait of Hormuz navigation and the release of frozen Iranian assets, while President Donald Trump demanded the strait open immediately with no tolls, insisted Iran "must agree" never to build a nuclear weapon, and said the naval blockade "will now be lifted" -- even as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said it remained in force and the US stood ready to resume combat. Iran's team said it had not approved the final text, an adviser to the supreme leader accused Trump of "betraying diplomacy," and the friction stayed live: Tehran said it downed a US MQ-1 Predator drone, US Central Command disabled a Gambia-flagged ship bound for an Iranian port, and Oman reported detecting a naval mine in the strait.

The war's aftershocks rippled through markets and strategy. Oil prices eased and US stocks touched records on optimism over a deal, even as a CNN analysis of satellite imagery showed Iran had already reopened 50 of 69 tunnel entrances at 18 underground missile bases struck earlier in the war, with an estimated 1,000 missiles still stored. Analysts cautioned that reopening the strait may not restore confidence, since Tehran is seeking a permanent role -- and possible transit tolls -- in governing the waterway that carries roughly a fifth of the world's oil.

The wind-down was part of a broader American pullback. At the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, Hegseth told Asian allies that "the era of the United States subsidizing the defense of wealthy nations is over," pressing them toward 3.5 percent of GDP and voicing "rightful alarm" at China's military build-up while sidestepping Taiwan; Japan's defense chief sought firmer assurances. In Europe, the Pentagon prepared to propose at a June NATO conference accelerating the removal of 5,000 of the roughly 35,000 US troops based in Germany. The same drive to share burdens produced a first AUKUS undersea-drone project, as the US, Britain and Australia launched joint work on uncrewed underwater systems to protect subsea cables and pipelines.

The Middle East's other war escalated sharply. Israeli forces captured Beaufort Castle, the Crusader-era fortress overlooking the Litani River, and pushed north of the river in their deepest incursion into Lebanon in 26 years; Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it a "dramatic shift" against Hezbollah and ordered troops to hold the site. With Lebanon's death toll since early March at 3,371, France's foreign minister, Jean-Noel Barrot, condemned the expansion as a "major fault" and requested an emergency UN Security Council meeting, even as Secretary of State Marco Rubio was reported set to unveil a new ceasefire on Tuesday.

The Russia-Ukraine war, meanwhile, breached NATO territory. A Russian drone struck a 10-storey apartment block in the Romanian port of Galati, injuring two people and forcing 70 to evacuate -- the first time a populated area in a NATO state had been hit with injuries since 2022 -- prompting Romania to expel the Russian ambassador and weigh invoking Article 4, and Poland's Donald Tusk to press the alliance after Moscow's Dmitry Medvedev warned such incidents "will continue to happen." Italy rushed fighter jets and about 100 personnel to Romania. On the offensive, Ukraine set a single-day record of 483 destroyed Russian vehicles in its "logistics lockdown," while Belarus's Alexander Lukashenko threatened a precision strike after a Ukrainian commander named 500 targets in his country.

Away from the fronts, Yale's Humanitarian Research Lab documented at least 20,570 Ukrainian children unlawfully transferred to Russia since 2022 -- a total researchers say may approach 200,000 -- through some 210 indoctrination facilities, and implicated the state energy giants Gazprom and Rosneft in moving at least 2,158, conduct that can amount to genocide under international law.

Beyond the wars, Colombians voted for a successor to President Gustavo Petro, barred from a second term, in a first round pitting his leftist Historic Pact candidate Ivan Cepeda -- the polling leader -- against the center-right's Paloma Valencia and the far-right outsider Abelardo De la Espriella, with a June 21 runoff likely as armed-group violence flared in the southwest. In Africa, Ethiopia moved toward mid-year elections shadowed by renewed tensions with the TPLF and a widening war in neighbouring Sudan. And in economics, SoftBank's Masayoshi Son pledged a record 75 billion euros for AI data centres in France ahead of a Macron investment summit, while a German poll found 69 percent of voters expecting a far-right AfD state-premier win this autumn.