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Paul Adams
@BBCPaulAdams
BBC Diplomatic Correspondent. Previously in Washington, Middle East and Balkans. Now a lot of Ukraine.
London
Joined January 2010
3.6K Following
18.3K Followers
7.1K Posts
Desperately sad news. Since leaving MI6, Sir Alex has been the most consistently thoughtful, insightful commentator on global affairs. Wise, humane and always measured. We will miss his voice.
In these globally turbulent times one man has regularly acted as a wise, thoughtful and witty guide for listeners of @BBCr4today. The former Head of MI6 Sir Alex Younger has analysed, explained and contextualised the actions of Trump, Putin, Xi and the Ayatollahs. After he first appeared in the programme I was lucky enough to get to know Alex and call him my friend. I’m desperately sad to hear the news I’ve long feared was coming. Alex has died after months trying to cheat the
prognosis he was given whe. They discovered the tumour he nicknamed “Putin”.
We’re always told not to speak of a fight with cancer because it risks implying that only those strong enough survive. I understand that. I really do but sod it. Alex fought so hard to find a treatment to give him a little longer to be with Sarah and their lovely children. And he used every last minute of the short time he did have to be with family and friends and to do what he spent a lifetime in the shadows doing - using his intelligence to understand the world, to explain it but, above all, to keep us all safe.
In this article Narges Bajoghli and I argue that the war has brought about a generational change in Iran’s leadership, bringing to the fore men with different experiences and outlook on state, society and foreign policy. This new generation is now confident that it ways has won significant strategic wins which it intends to translate not only into a new regional order but also a new domestic order and social contract with the population.
The scale of the war and it took for Iran to survive it and fore the U.S. into a stalemate has also changed Iranian society in profound way. Social grievances remain but will express themselves in this new context. We explain why pre-war ways of understanding Iran don't explain it anymore.
“The emergent Islamic Republic will remain highly authoritarian. But the categories that Western analysts have often used to describe the Islamic Republic’s various factions—hard-liner versus moderates, ideologues versus reformists—will be less accurate than ever. The new Islamic Republic’s priorities, and how it pursues them, will be shaped by the specific experiences of its two wars with the United States and Israel: the losses Iran sustained, the confidence its leadership gained, and the new social contract the fighting has made necessary and possible.”
https://t.co/RATaDcKLBK
Feels like the sort of creative thinking that should be going on all over the Gulf right now
Please don't take this seriously because Oman won't, but there's a narrow passage in Musandam which in theory could be opened up to allow up to 25 meters draft depth for vessels to navigate through. The rocky land bridge at Maksa is only 228m wide. Suez Canal is 193km long.
“Strategic improvisation”
It’s hard to escape the sense that the administration simply does not have a coherent strategy for Iran, and that what we are witnessing instead is a form of strategic improvisation.
Washington does not want a war, yet it also does not want to appear politically weak by accepting terms associated with Iranian demands. The result is a prolonged state of limbo that deepens uncertainty in the global economy while doing little to convince Tehran to fundamentally alter its position.
The constant policy shifts, contradictory public messaging, and oscillation between threats and diplomatic signaling all point to a deeper problem: the inability to build a sustainable and coherent Iran strategy. On one hand, there is fear in Washington of appearing to concede to Iran. On the other, there is growing recognition that escalation alone is unlikely to force the Iranian leadership to capitulate or accept maximalist American demands at the negotiating table.
At the core of this problem lies a deeper issue — a persistent misunderstanding of how Iran’s leadership perceives pressure, deterrence, and strategic endurance. Many policymakers in Washington continue to approach Iran through frameworks developed for other geopolitical rivals, assuming that economic pressure, military threats, or diplomatic isolation will eventually produce strategic surrender. But the Iranian system has repeatedly demonstrated a high tolerance for prolonged pressure and a willingness to absorb significant costs in pursuit of regime survival and long-term strategic objectives.
This disconnect helps explain why U.S. policy often appears reactive rather than strategic: alternating between coercion and de-escalation without a clearly defined end state. The administration understands the risks of military escalation, especially after years of instability across the Middle East, yet it has also boxed itself into a political environment where compromise is easily framed domestically as weakness.
The consequence is a policy caught between incompatible objectives: avoiding war, avoiding concessions, maintaining deterrence, reassuring allies, and preventing regional escalation, all without a realistic framework for changing Iranian behavior.
#IranWar
Who to follow
Yaroslav Trofimov 
@yarotrof
Chief Foreign-Affairs Correspondent of WSJ. Author of 📚No Country for Love 📚 and 📕Our Enemies Will Vanish📕 and 📘Siege of Mecca 📘Insta @yarotrof
Jeremy Bowen
@BowenBBC
International Editor, BBC News
Siobhán O'Grady
@siobhan_ogrady
@nytimes correspondent in Ukraine. previously @washingtonpost bureau chief in Kyiv and Cairo. it’s pronounced Sha-VON.
“By all means, watch the gauges. Just do not forget that Tehran tends to read them differently.”
Why Iran’s Oil Pain Does Not Guarantee Capitulation https://t.co/FydfuQpjwN
Why Iran's oil pipelines probably won't "explode." https://t.co/0fd7LXAug5
I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue.
On April 21st, the left screen moved first.
I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug.
At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy.
On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me.
At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire.
Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83.
I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags.
My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports.
The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026:
Reviewed.
That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one.
Let me show you my flags.
March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it.
March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it.
April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it.
April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it.
April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it.
That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one.
The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March.
Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012.
Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence.
Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets.
The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade.
I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email.
The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action.
One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared.
One account is a coincidence. But there were six.
Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000.
My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger.
March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes.
The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event.
The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting."
Then the White House sent the email again.
I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread.
I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated.
But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed.
Zero prosecutions.
As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations.
I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations.
The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still.
In my field, we call this price discovery.
I was wondering how long it would be before we saw this headline
After a decade of fiercely attacking a previous deal with Iran, President Trump has authorized U.S. negotiators to consider a bargain that involves many of the same trade-offs one of his predecessors confronted.
https://t.co/qkIGvwxxsv
CHART OF THE DAY: The size of the 🇨🇳 Chinese strategic petroleum reserve is mind blowing: larger than 🇺🇸 US + 🇯🇵 Japan + the whole of 🇪🇺 Western Europe combined.
Via @EIAgov — more: https://t.co/bZVjzOHL7Z
A very volatile and distressing situation west of Hormuz. Yesterday, when the Strait of Hormuz “opened” and then shut so quickly, @WindwardAI detected at least 33 outbound ships reversing course mid-transit.
You can imagine how terrifying that was for the hundreds of crew on those containerships, VLCCs, LNG carriers and bulk carriers that had to turn around.
Vessels abandoned Hormuz transits as the IRGC fired on one tanker and shot projectiles at another containership. The “completely open” strait (according to Iran’s foreign minister on April 17) is now shut again to most commercial traffic.
That hasn’t stopped Iran’s dark fleet and other Iran-linked ships at least making an attempt to break the US blockade.
Over the past 36 hours, eight vessels that had called at Iran ports or were sailing to Iran ports were also tracked reversing course. At least two of these were observed this morning in the last few hours, at least one far out in the Gulf of Oman. (and while I was writing this and just checking my numbers I found a third)
So what did get out in that brief period of time? Not much oil. Of the six tankers tracked outbound via AIS that had no Iran links was just one VLCC (sailing for China) and another LPG carrier (also for China).
A few ships turned off their AIS in the midst of the chaos and made it out. All up ~12 ships got out.
Those included three passenger vessels that exited Hormuz using the southern corridor in Omani waters.
Iran is accelerating workarounds and deceptive shipping practices as the US blockade bites. There were at least six ships assessed as linked to Iran that came inbound in the last 36 hours –mostly to the port of Bandar Abbas -- by hugging the Iranian coastline all the way along the Gulf of Oman, including at least two Iran-flagged containerships that had previously called at China and India.
This morning the media are saying that Hormuz has “ground to a standstill” and closed again. I would argue it was never open, as there was no freedom of navigation – all ships still needed IRGC permission. And therein lies the problem.
The events of the past 24 hours are a major setback for global trade. What nascent confidence there was among maritime stakeholders (shipowners, oil traders, war risk marine insurers, big container lines and oil cargo insurers -- given so many laden VLCCs turned around) has evaporated. They won’t be so quick to return next time either Iran or the US declares the strait open amid some tenuous ceasefire deal.
Those transit reversals all took place within 24 hours of the Iranian announcement. This morning the BBC interviewed the master of one of the vessels that did so. He spoke of the profound anxiety of the crew and the psychological distress of the events. Let’s not forget this.
As good an explanation as you will see from the excellent @JavierBlas
President Trump says the Strait of Hormuz is open.
But do note Tehran says shipping traffic needs to follow the "coordinated route as already announced” by Iran.
What's that route? My @Opinion video explainer, published originally last week, shows it.
sums up the confusion (and fear) being experienced by vessels trying to pass through the Strait of Hormuz
Here’s today’s audio recording involving SANMAR HERALD (9330563).
President Trump says the Strait of Hormuz is open.
But do note Tehran says shipping traffic needs to follow the "coordinated route as already announced” by Iran.
What's that route? My @Opinion video explainer, published originally last week, shows it.
Is the scene gradually being set for the next round of US-Iranian talks?
https://t.co/KgQNfUqsY7
Another first for Ukraine?
‼️ ZELENSKYY: For the first time in the war, an enemy position was captured entirely by ground robotic systems and drones - without any infantry. A robot entered the most dangerous zones instead of a soldier and took the positions.
«The future is here, on the battlefield, and Ukraine is creating it. These are our ground robotic systems. For the first time in this war's history, an enemy position was taken exclusively by unmanned GRS platforms and drones. The occupiers surrendered, and this operation was completed without infantry involvement and without losses on our side. Ratel, Termite, Ardal, Lynx, Zmiy, Protector, Volya and other GRS completed over 22 000 missions at the front in just 3 months. In other words, over 22 000 times lives were saved. A robot went into the most dangerous zones instead of a soldier» - Zelenskyy’s address to the workers of Ukraine’s defense-industrial complex. April 13th, 2026.
I see your blockade and I raise you. Trump's latest gamble. https://t.co/kc3v3Hv3ii
“Ghalibaf…impressed the American team as a refined and professional bargainer.” https://t.co/7UiiCstGX8
Washington’s “military options are costly, its diplomatic leverage is limited, and time is increasingly working against it.”
The U.S. Faces a Strategic Deadlock with Iran
The failure of the recent talks in #Islamabadtalks drives from the fact that Iran did not arrive at the negotiating table weakened or desperate. On the contrary, Tehran came with a sense of resilience, and even advantage and behaved accordingly.
For weeks, the U.S. policy appears to have been guided by the assumption that sustained kinetic pressure had eroded Iran’s position enough to force meaningful concessions, particularly on uranium enrichment and freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz.
But negotiations are not shaped by objective reality alone, they are driven by perception. And Iran’s perception is fundamentally different.
From Tehran’s perspective, it has withstood pressure, absorbed blows, and demonstrated its capacity to retaliate across multiple arenas. That is not the mindset of a regime preparing to compromise.
This gap between American expectations and Iranian self-perception now lies at the heart of a growing strategic deadlock.
The options facing Washington are all "problematic":
A. Renewed negotiations may simply reproduce the same dynamics, with Iran unwilling to concede and the U.S. unwilling to settle for less.
B. Ending the confrontation without an agreement risks signaling weakness and undermining deterrence. Escalation, meanwhile, carries the most significant risks of all.
C. A return to high-intensity conflict is unlikely to produce decisive results. While strikes on Iranian infrastructure, or even more ambitious military moves, could impose real costs on the regime, they would almost certainly trigger a broader response. Iran has both the capability and the willingness to expand the conflict horizontally, targeting U.S. interests, Israel, and regional partners. The result would not be a quick resolution, but a wider war with direct implications for global energy markets and economic stability.
In other words, military escalation may satisfy the desire to reassert leverage, but it is unlikely to deliver a strategic breakthrough.
This leaves Washington with a difficult but unavoidable conclusion: the burden of recalibrating strategy rests primarily on the United States.
That does not mean conceding to Iranian demands. But it does require a more sober assessment of what pressure alone can achieve, and a clearer understanding of the risks embedded in escalation.
The alternative is to continue operating under an illusion of leverage, one that recent events have already begun to expose.
Complicating matters further are the mounting political and strategic constraints facing Washington. With a high-stakes meeting between President Trump and China’s Xi Jinping on the horizon, a global spotlight event like the Soccer World Cup approaching, and midterm elections looming, the U.S. has limited appetite, and even less time, for a prolonged military campaign.
Large-scale options such as a ground invasion would require months to execute and sustain, with no guarantee of decisive results. Even extensive strikes on Iranian infrastructure, while painful, are unlikely to deliver a knockout blow. Instead, they risk entrenching the conflict and inviting retaliation across multiple fronts.
Taken together, these constraints underscore a deeper reality: the United States is not just facing a tactical dilemma, but a strategic entanglement, one in which its military options are costly, its diplomatic leverage is limited, and time is increasingly working against it.
Meanwhile, Iran remains defiant. The regime shows no indication that it is prepared to yield, certainly not under pressure, and not at this stage.
Strategy deadlock.
#IranWar
The five big sticking points in US-Iran talks https://t.co/oYgCOtx1kW
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