It isn’t always easy to keep up with what’s happening in the US. “Shorter America” is a series where Dr Emma Shortis loops you in on what’s going on in America and shares news and analysis that you can trust.
Fri 27 Mar 2026 15.00
The White House/Flickr
The Trump administration’s war on Iran continues. The President talks about diplomacy even while sending more forces to the Middle East – as the NPR Politics Podcast observed, he is “escalating and de-escalating” at the same time. Which is not a thing.
This week:
According to this rolling update in Al Jazeera, over 2,500 people have been killed in the illegal wars on Iran and Lebanon. The real numbers are undoubtedly a lot higher, both as a direct result of constant bombing and as humanitarian crises deepen.
“War,” as an Iranian woman living in Tehran writes in this deeply moving war diary published in the Boston Review, “belongs to innocent people.“
The cruelty is entirely the point. Trump and his surrogates have been clear about that.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has said again and again that this war is being prosecuted “without mercy”, that the United States will not be bound by “stupid rules of engagement”. He is busy reforming US defense forces in that image.
As this Politico report outlines, “The number of Pentagon employees who focus on mitigating civilian casualties has dropped from 200 people to less than 40”. Further: “The team that handles civilian casualties at Central Command, which oversees the Middle East, has dropped from 10 to one.”
That report was written in the context of the strike on the girls’ school in Iran. It is also overshadowed by US strikes on boats in Latin America, and a recent report in The New York Times that the drug-trafficking camp the administration claimed to have wiped out in Ecuador was in fact a dairy farm.
There is more going on here than just incompetence or this administration’s particular bloodthirstiness – though they both matter deeply.
Historian of technology Kevin Baker has written an absolutely superb piece on this called “Kill Chain”. I cannot recommend it highly enough. It’s so good a new version will be published in The Guardian soon, but it wasn’t up before my deadline. You can follow Kevin on Bluesky and via Substack. I’ll post the updated version here next week.
The war on Iran is rightly taking much, if not all, of our focus when it comes to US politics. That and Trump’s style often lead people to frame Iran as a “distraction” — from Epstein, from tanking approval ratings, from whatever. And it’s certainly true that in times of crisis authoritarian leaders will look to an outside enemy to consolidate their power at home (which, incidentally, is yet another reason that war on Iran is a fucking terrible idea).
But I don’t think it’s helpful to think of Trump in those terms. Trumpism is driven by a radical project to reshape America at home and abroad; Iran is part of that. As is what Trump is doing at home – which, at the moment, includes using a partial government shutdown to justify deploying ICE agents at airports.
The shutdown has partially halted funding to the Department of Homeland Security – specifically, to the Transport Security Agency, which runs airport security. TSA agents aren’t getting paid, so airports are experiencing extreme backlogs. People are waiting hours to get through airport security. So Trump deployed ICE to do the job of TSA agents – which they don’t appear to be doing. Independent journalist Marisa Kabas is keeping track.
As is so often the case with Trump, this is both ridiculous and deeply serious all at the same time.
While ICE agents hold on to their little vests and wander around eating snacks, American airports teeter on the brink. At LaGuardia this week, an Air Canada plane collided with a firetruck, killing two pilots. Reports suggest that the accident was due to extreme stress on safety systems – there were only two aircraft controllers in the control tower at the time, and they were doing multiple jobs.
As usual, this problem was a long time in the making – Trump is just an expert at bringing everything to a head all at once. Anyone who’s been to an American airport in the last several decades would have felt the constant undercurrent of potential violence and barely controlled chaos. This analysis in The New York Times helps explain why flying in America is so awful.
As I’ve mentioned before, travel to the US from Australia had already halved. As if we needed another reason not to go.
Will a gas export tax harm our diplomatic relationships? No. Foreign companies being sad about having to pay some tax in Australia is quite different to foreign countries losing trust in Australia as a reliable trade partner.
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So much of what passes for Australian political discourse relies on existential threats. It’s easy to make grandiose statements and take positions when the threat is some amorphous vague maybe that could possibly happen.
Australia faces an unprecedented oil security challenge. Fatih Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), described the current oil shock as “the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market”, and is calling on countries to act rapidly to reduce economic impacts. While Australia navigated recent oil shocks unscathed thanks to a high self-reliance in oil and oil products, the Iran crisis is markedly different.
