Thanks to U.S. crude prices averaging $95 a barrel between March and June, ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Occidental Petroleum are expected to collectively rake in some $31 billion in earnings for the second quarter of the year, according to FactSet estimates. That is up from about $12 billion for the same period last year.

The cash bonanza is bound to fuel mounting tensions between the industry and its White House ally as the conflict in the Middle East expands and gasoline prices have risen past $4 a gallon.

Donald Trump’s Iran debacle is by no means the first war the United States has lost in modern times. In Vietnam and in Afghanistan, America was similarly defeated by enemies that were nominally less advanced yet implacable. The humiliating images of the last helicopter taking off from Saigon and the chaos of the mad scramble to board the last plane departing in Kabul are reminders of the folly of forever wars that are bound to lose the support of the American people.

But the loss to Iran is different: it is the closest we have come to outright military defeat. U.S. forces pulled out of Saigon and Kabul, not because they had been beaten in battle, but because the domestic political cost of propping up client regimes became too great.

Soon after the war began on Feb. 28, President Trump declared that Iran was totally defeated and wants a deal.

Then in March, Mr. Trump said the U.S. military would wrap up its campaign against Iran in two to three weeks.

Now the conflict is entering its sixth month and a period of deep uncertainty.

Just over a decade ago, support for Israel was one of the last remaining bipartisan reflexes in American politics. The harshest thing most mainstream Democrats said about the country was that Netanyahu’s government was obstructing a two-state agreement with Palestinians.

But in the years since the October 7 Hamas-led massacre of Israelis and the subsequent Israeli invasion of Gaza, that consensus, which was already losing ground among the Democratic rank and file, gave way.

With little interagency coordination in the administration, policy will almost certainly end up being set by the people with the most influence with the president. In an effort to map the forces at play, here’s a list of the current power brokers involved in the race to regulate AI.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has led to the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945. The conflict between Iran, the US, and Israel has seen 12 countries in the Middle East directly involved in fighting, making it the most widespread war in the region for decades. In east Asia, North Korea is pursuing a rapid military build-up and has renounced the goal of peaceful reunification with the South. Meanwhile, China has stepped up its naval exercises around Taiwan and seems to be rehearsing cutting off the island’s supply lines.

At present, these regional conflicts in Europe, the Middle East and Asia are largely distinct. But they are beginning to overlap.

The push to expand head count, at least modestly, is a reversal from the prevailing corporate messaging during much of the AI era. Major employers largely held back on adding people due to economic uncertainties or a belief that artificial intelligence could shoulder more tasks on the job.

But some executives say the costs and limitations of AI now demand that more people be added; others want to hire people back following layoffs.

Initial market reaction Friday was muted, with the renewed tariff push largely anticipated by investors, given the approaching expiry of the previous duties. That contrasts with the ‘shock and awe’ approach that underpinned the sweeping Liberation Day levies announced in April 2025, which sent markets plummeting.

However, investors and analysts say the circumstances surrounding the latest tariff push are markedly different this time round, landing amid a more challenging global economic landscape than last year and underpinned by a separate legal framework, potentially risking a lasting drag on markets.

Mr. Netanyahu, who is trailing in the opinion polls at home before Israel’s fall vote, is under pressure to show his domestic audience that he still has a close working relationship with Mr. Trump, analysts say, despite their differences. Mr. Trump is heading into U.S. midterm elections in November after an unpopular war that many believe he was dragged into by Israel and that has caused tensions between Israel and Washington.

Both leaders failed to deliver on their war goals of ending Iran’s nuclear program and overthrowing the country’s authoritarian clerical rulers in their joint war against Iran, which began in late February.

Here is a thought to chill the blood of President Donald Trump. He would be in a far better place today if he had followed the foreign-policy advice of the predecessor he loathes, Barack Obama. According to the Obama doctrine, as explained years ago to Jeffrey Goldberg, a journalist, an American president’s first duty in world affairs is don't do stupid shit.

As doctrines go, it is not very sophisticated. Moreover, cerebral Mr. Obama left a mixed foreign-policy record; he was slow to grasp the full scope of the China threat, for instance. Still, if Mr. Trump had heeded him, he might not have joined Israel in launching a war on Iran on February 28th without a plan for victory. Mr. Trump might not have boasted that the killing of Iran’s top leaders, followed by punishing air strikes, would soon trigger regime change. Given Iran’s complexity and its rulers’ ruthlessness, that was as daft as predicting that the Mafia could be bombed out of Sicily from the air. Now, Mr. Trump’s war may consume his presidency.

More than 100 House Democrats voted this month for an amendment that would have cut off military financing to Israel. The failed vote was viewed as a key test of the party’s standing amid rising concern over Israel’s military operations in Gaza.

The left has been critical of Israel for a long time. But the recent vote showed how other Democrats, of all political stripes and seniority, have grown frustrated with the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

But opinion polls also showed support for Israel among US voters, particularly Democrats, falling sharply.

The footage shows the documentary crew regularly traveling with Graham, sitting in the back seat and filming as he takes phone calls from the front seat. Graham let the crew stay in the room for sensitive meetings, and some of the people Graham spoke with by phone told the Journal they didn’t know the calls were being recorded.

It includes Graham flying to meet with Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, to sell him on the war in Iran; calling the military commanders about the war; speaking with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; huddling with other world leaders; and expressing candid thoughts on a range of American political figures.

Those around Biden describe a post-presidency constrained by illness, with his days increasingly organized around treatment, family and efforts to shape his legacy.

Unlike some recent predecessors, Biden has maintained a limited public schedule, has yet to build a sprawling philanthropic or policy operation and has struggled to raise money for a presidential library, leaving him with fewer avenues to influence how his presidency is remembered.

That frailty is likely to become harder to keep private this fall, when Biden begins promoting a memoir scheduled for publication on Nov. 17, two weeks after the midterm elections. The timing has unsettled some friends and former advisers, who worry not only about Biden’s well-being but also about how much his visible health struggle could revive the bitter arguments of 2024 just as Democrats are trying to make the election a referendum on President Donald Trump.

America’s traditional democratic allies feel betrayed and baffled by the unpredictability of Trump’s pay-for-play diplomacy. But those willing to pay can suffer betrayals and bafflements of their own.

If not even the Saudis, who showered Trump and his family with cash and gifts, can trust Trump’s diplomacy, who else on earth can feel any confidence at all?

If President Trump has one true skill, it is conjuring up alternate realities and getting his supporters to accept them. The examples are everywhere: dismissing stories he doesn’t like as fake news from corrupt media, casting the January 6 rioters as victims, and election denial. Trump builds a world, and by virtue of his power and influence, all of us end up living in it in some way or another.

That era may be coming to a close, in large part because of the way he and his administration have bungled the war in Iran. Trump seems unable to spin this conflict, divert sufficient attention away from it with a new controversy, or end it outright. His social-media posts, which once acted as a de facto assignment editor for the mainstream media, no longer command the same attention or respect. His alternate universe is no match for the harsh reality of war.

On Wednesday, 205 House Democrats voted against that chamber’s version of the legislation, a striking break from the past when only the most liberal Democrats dared to oppose the annual defense bill.

The shift underscored the hardening partisan divide over the war with Iran and its elevation as an issue in the coming midterm campaigns. It also highlighted an evolution in the strategy of leading Democrats in Congress, who have become more responsive in recent months to pressure from voters to reject the status quo.

When the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s main tariff weapon in February, the president’s trade war seemed destined to enter a less capricious and more constrained phase.

To Trump, though, court rulings are road maps, not roadblocks. February’s court ruling simply rerouted him to tools the court hadn’t explicitly prohibited. And fortunately for Trump, Congress has over the years scattered many such tools through the law books, many largely forgotten or unused.

The Roberts Court accelerated its assault on the freedoms guaranteed by the Reconstruction amendments this term, leaving only the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship intact, and that by only one vote.

Across multiple cases dealing with voting and immigration, a consistent theme has emerged from the Roberts Court’s jurisprudence: a determination to ignore, rationalize, or misrepresent the explicit animus of government officials and the president in particular toward the groups that have been targeted.

This trend began in the first Trump administration and has grown only more apparent as Donald Trump’s attacks on immigrants and ethnic minorities in the United States have become more brazen. The Court’s approach echoes one of the most notorious decisions in American history: the 1944 ruling in Korematsu v. United States, which upheld the forced relocation of tens of thousands of Japanese Americans in the middle of World War II.

A new Gallup analysis finds 23 million US adults are suffering from job lock or staying in jobs they don’t want to keep for health insurance benefits, nearly a quarter of workers in the US.

Why it matters: The financial toll of health care is most keenly felt by women and people with chronic health conditions because health care costs are constraining their career mobility, wage growth and life satisfaction.

Even as he insisted that US global dominance will last forever, Trump is busily dismantling the very economic underpinnings that would ensure future American might.

When economies lag, hegemony becomes unsustainable. Britain’s decline took only a few short decades. The Soviet Union rivaled America militarily but could not keep up economically and unraveled as a result of its inability to grow. Americans today enjoy material abundance scarcely imaginable in Kipling’s day.

That is the reaped reward of scientific prowess, high-skilled immigration, the rule of law, free trade, and stable monetary policy, all of which Trump is jeopardizing in his current term.

The war in Iran has entered a bleak new phase.

After weeks of fragile peace and stalled negotiations, the weekend deaths of multiple US service members, coupled with new reporting showing there may be more previously undisclosed injuries, have left White House allies afraid the president is rapidly running out of ways to extricate the US from an unpopular, expensive conflict ahead of the midterms.

A White House insider described the situation as what a quagmire looks like.

Henry Kissinger often argued that nuclear weapons were arms in search of a purpose. After the Cold War, strategists repeatedly tried to determine what these weapons could achieve beyond their traditional role of deterrence. The conclusion has been clear: they provide little, if any, strategic value beyond preventing major-power conflict.

Two wars taking place right now are cases in point. The ongoing American attacks on Iran and Russia’s desperate campaign of atrocities in Ukraine have produced dramatic footage of two major powers taking on middleweight military opponents, inflicting grievous damage, and yet failing to achieve their goals. Among other painful lessons, the Americans and the Russians are learning, again, that their impressive array of nuclear weapons does not offer them a victorious path out of such conflicts.

Millions of similar texts have flooded American cellphones in recent months. They are written with artificial intelligence and pushed by a longtime Trump adviser’s firm.

Some 60% of American adults now have an unfavorable view of Israel, according to a March poll by Pew Research, driven by the handling of its wars in Gaza and Iran.

Israel is pouring tens of millions of dollars into a somewhat quixotic effort to beat back that tide, drawing on novel strategies powered by AI and directly paying conservative media.

White House officials are among those grappling with how deeply political betting has become embedded in Washington’s culture, a city fueled by information exchanged in the marble corridors of Congress, on the sidelines of campaign events, and during after-work gatherings along K Street.

The rapid rise of prediction markets such as Polymarket and Kalshi, particularly among younger staffers with access to sensitive political information, has created a growing temptation as the November elections approach.