The United States conducted approximately 21,000 attacks on Iran up to 7 April 2026. It destroyed Iran's air force and navy entirely. It severely damaged the IRGC and Iranian ground forces. None of it produced Iranian capitulation. The political centre of gravity strategy — decapitating IRGC leadership, destroying the decision-making architecture, leaving Iran no alternative but to surrender — failed. Defence analyst Sir Michael Clarke, former Director General of RUSI, assessed in his Sky News Day 74 briefing that attacking the political centre of gravity was a failure by 7 April.

Iran retains control of the Strait of Hormuz through small craft, drones and robotic ships. The US military — two carrier strike groups, two marine expeditionary units, a brigade of the 82nd Airborne — is 400 to 500 miles from the strait. Moving that military power into the Gulf of Oman and fighting a physical battle for the Strait would likely succeed militarily. But even a damaged American carrier, even American personnel casualties, would be a political catastrophe that Trump could not survive domestically. Iran has calculated this correctly. The Iranians calculate they can live with the material damage of this war longer than Trump can live with the political damage it is doing, as Clarke observed. That calculation has not been proven wrong.

Operation Freedom, a sixth-generation warfare attempt using drones, missiles and AI to pressurise Iranian Hormuz activity, was tried for one day and stopped. Trump says he may return to it. The side deal model — bilateral arrangements between Iran and individual nations allowing specific vessels to transit — is expanding, implicitly legitimising Iranian control of an international waterway. The ceasefire is on massive life support by Trump's own description. Iran has submitted demands that Trump called garbage. The negotiating gap has not narrowed in 74 days.

Trump's second term opened with Liberation Day — tariffs for all, China in particular. The strategic logic was economic coercion producing Chinese concessions. The outcome was different. China decided it was not going to take it lying down. A tit-for-tat escalation followed that saw tariffs at their height above 125 per cent on both sides. China's retaliation squeezed Trump. So did the US Supreme Court, which struck down parts of his tariff policy. US-China tariffs are now down on both sides. America felt the pain of a trade war. Trump is not delivering on promises to bring down prices. The trade war produced a draw at best and a retreat at worst.

The rare earth leverage has proved decisive. China is almost totally dominant in rare earth element production — the vital components in smartphones, electric vehicles, AI technology and cutting-edge military weaponry. China turned off the taps during the tariff escalation and exposed a structural American vulnerability that no tariff policy can rapidly reverse. It is an ace card and China has not yet finished playing it.

Trump arrives in Beijing in a weaker position than he expected. He travels with the Iran war unresolved and with a request that China lean on its Iranian relationships to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz. As Sky News Asia correspondent Helen-Ann Smith noted from Beijing, America's request to China to lean on its friends in Iran to reopen the strait is not the dynamic Trump had scripted. In the constantly shifting power balance between Washington and Beijing, China saving the day is not a Trump victory. Xi plays the long game. He faces no ballot box. Chinese social media's description of Trump as a nation builder — for China — captures the structural reality of who has benefited most from the past 74 days.

The Global South did not start the Iran war. It did not participate in the tariff escalation. It has no seat at the table in Beijing. But it is paying the costs of all three simultaneously. Brent crude above $100 per barrel means every oil-importing developing economy is transferring wealth to oil producers and trading houses at a rate that their fiscal frameworks were not designed to sustain. JPMorgan's inventory data, published by Bloomberg and analysed in The Meridian earlier this month, projects world oil inventories hitting the operational stress level of 7.6 billion barrels by June 2026 and the operational floor — below which pipelines stop and refineries go offline — by September 2026 if no resolution occurs.

The oil blockade on Cuba has created a humanitarian energy crisis documented by Human Rights Watch, the UN and international media. Fifteen hours of daily blackouts in parts of Havana. Hospitals unable to operate safely. The blockade is a direct instrument of Trump's Don-ro Doctrine asserting US dominance over the Western Hemisphere. Its costs are borne by eleven million Cuban civilians who have no leverage over any of the governments whose decisions determine whether their lights come on.

The Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi opened on 11 May without US engagement, as African heads of state convened with France and European partners to build an economic architecture that explicitly positions Africa as a co-author of the global agenda rather than a recipient of Washington's attention when convenient. China has poured billions into the Global South through its Belt and Road framework and has positioned itself as an unjudgmental friend to nations that feel let down by the United States. The Africa Forward Summit was a data point in that repositioning. It will not be the last.

For small island developing states — Mauritius, the Maldives, Barbados, Fiji — the second Trump term has produced elevated oil prices, dollar strength that raises import costs, and a geopolitical environment in which the two dominant powers are engaged in a conflict whose costs fall disproportionately on those least able to absorb them.

Trump has threatened to pull out of NATO. He has threatened to annex Greenland, a NATO member territory. He has described the alliance in terms that leave European partners uncertain whether the Article 5 mutual defence guarantee means what it has meant for 75 years. European governments have responded not with deference but with strategic autonomy — accelerating defence spending, deepening EU security cooperation and reducing dependence on American security guarantees that can no longer be taken as unconditional.

The pattern of cosying up to authoritarian leaders while undermining democratic alliance partners has produced a specific strategic consequence that Trump may not have intended. It has made China's positioning as a stable, predictable partner more credible by contrast. While Trump disrupts, China casts itself as the grown-up in the room, as Sky News noted from Beijing. Nations that might have previously defaulted to the American alliance framework are conducting their own strategic assessments.

On Taiwan, Trump's strategic ambiguity has introduced doubt where previous presidents maintained clarity. Unlike predecessors who made clear they would defend Taiwan if China attacked, Trump's public statements have left room for uncertainty. Xi Jinping, who has sworn to retake Taiwan by force if necessary, is calculating that uncertainty into his strategic planning. The PLA has never officially fought a war. China does not mind the US being distracted and depleted elsewhere, as Clarke observed. It has its eyes on Taiwan. The Western alliance's credibility as a deterrent to Chinese military ambition in the Pacific is weaker at day 74 of the second term than it was at day 1.

US regular petrol prices breached $4.50 per gallon last week. Diesel is approaching all-time highs. Household sentiment is at record lows even as stock markets have reached record highs — a divergence that reflects the gap between the financial asset owners who benefit from energy sector earnings and defence contractor profits, and the wage-dependent households who pay at the pump and in the supermarket. The Federal Reserve cannot cut interest rates into an oil-driven inflation shock without risking a wage-price spiral. It cannot raise rates further without triggering the recession the real economy is already approaching.

The trade war with China produced higher consumer prices without producing the manufacturing reshoring that was its stated objective. Rolling back decades of outsourcing and reliance on China is not straightforward, as Sky News noted. The Supreme Court's intervention on tariff policy has constrained Trump's primary economic instrument. The Iran war has added a permanent energy price premium that central banks cannot address through interest rate policy because it is a supply shock, not a demand shock. The combination of supply-side inflation, constrained monetary policy and weakened consumer sentiment is an economic environment that will test the second term's political durability.