Middle East and North Africa

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Situation Report.

Here’s what’s on tap for the day: U.S. President Donald Trump gives his first speech about the Iran war in more than a month, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi gets her walking papers, and Israel passes a controversial death penalty law targeting Palestinians.

Welcome back to Foreign Policy’s Situation Report.

Here’s what’s on tap for the day: U.S. President Donald Trump gives his first speech about the Iran war in more than a month, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi gets her walking papers, and Israel passes a controversial death penalty law targeting Palestinians.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s rare prime-time address to the nation on Wednesday was billed as a major update on the Iran war’s progress, and financial markets rallied on hopes that he would provide a clear plan and timeline for ending the war.

Yet Trump spent most of the short, roughly 20-minute speech reiterating assertions that he has repeatedly made in interviews and on social media in recent weeks, proclaiming victory over Iran while also saying that the war will continue and offering only a vague timeline for when he intends to conclude it.

Despite the shifting and sometimes contradictory justifications that the Trump administration has provided for starting this war a month ago, Trump outlined “simple and clear” objectives, including the destruction of Iran’s navy, air force, and missile stockpiles, which he said will “deny them the ability to build a nuclear bomb.”

Notably, Trump did not mention a possible operation to seize Iran’s stockpile of the highly enriched uranium that it could use to build such a bomb, claiming instead that the “nuclear dust” is inaccessible to the Iranian regime because the U.S. military had “obliterated” it in airstrikes last June. Trump also said that regime change had not been a goal of the war but that “regime change has occurred because of all of their original leaders’ death.”

As for what comes next—and when—Trump offered few definitive answers to the American people and the rest of the world. “I can say tonight that we are on........

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