July 08, 2026

Good morning! Today is Wednesday, July 8th 2026, and this is The American Conservative's Morning Brief. The U.S. military launched massive retaliatory strikes on more than 80 targets in southwestern Iran after attacks on commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, with Iranian forces reportedly striking back at Bahrain within hours. At the NATO summit in Ankara, President Trump signaled a warming of ties with Turkey, lifting sanctions and opening the door to F-35 sales despite Israeli objections. Jack Hunter argues that conservative outrage over democratic socialist Melat Kiros's 9/11 blowback remarks revives Bush-Cheney-era speech codes—ignoring that Pat Buchanan, Ron Paul, and Robert Novak all made the same case. and now for the details. We begin with breaking news from the Persian Gulf. The U.S. military announced Tuesday evening it was launching what it called a series of powerful strikes against Iran, in retaliation for Iranian attacks on three commercial vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz. The Pentagon described the Iranian attacks as unwarranted, dangerous, and a clear violation of the ceasefire reached last month. According to reporting cited by Andrew Day at The American Conservative, U.S. forces struck southwestern Iran, hitting more than 80 targets—including air-defense systems, coastal surveillance, surface-to-air missiles, anti-ship cruise missile sites, drone launch sites, and port facilities. A U.S. official told Axios the strikes were four to five times more powerful than those conducted ten days ago. Within hours, reports emerged of Iranian retaliatory strikes against Bahrain, which hosts the U.S. Navy's Fifth Fleet. As Day reports, the escalation follows the White House's decision earlier Tuesday to reinstate sanctions on Iranian oil sales that had been lifted as part of last month's memorandum of understanding. Tehran called that move a violation of the agreement, insisting it retains the right to manage traffic through the strait. In a related dispatch, Harrison Berger notes that the damaged vessels included a Qatari-owned liquefied natural gas carrier and a Saudi-flagged crude oil tanker, and that President Trump, speaking earlier in the day at the NATO summit in Ankara, had signaled a warming of ties with Turkey—announcing the lifting of sanctions and openness to selling F-35 fighter jets to Ankara, in defiance of pressure from Israeli officials who have urged a more confrontational posture toward President Erdogan. Turning to the intersection of foreign policy and domestic politics, a new controversy has erupted over remarks by Melat Kiros, the 29-year-old democratic socialist who last week defeated 15-term incumbent Diana DeGette in a Denver Democratic primary. Asked by a local reporter whether she believed the 9/11 attacks were, like the October 7th attack on Israel, an inevitable consequence of U.S. foreign policy, Kiros said American destabilization of the Middle East had led people to believe violence was the only response. Conservative commentators, including Nikki Haley and the Republican Jewish Coalition, accused her of blaming America for 9/11. As Jack Hunter writes for The American Conservative, that reaction represents a kind of time warp—reviving the Bush-Cheney-era speech codes that once branded any discussion of blowback as anti-American. Hunter points out that Pat Buchanan, a cofounder of the magazine, said much the same thing for two decades—on MSNBC, in his columns, and in his 1999 book A Republic, Not An Empire, which even named Osama bin Laden as a likely instigator of a catastrophic attack on an American city. Hunter recalls Ron Paul's famous 2008 debate exchange with Rudy Giuliani, when Paul invoked the CIA's own concept of blowback and saw his political movement take off. Columnist Robert Novak made similar arguments after 9/11. Hunter argues that while the rise of democratic socialists in Democratic primaries isn't good news for the country, it's a healthy development that Americans across the political spectrum can now discuss the consequences of U.S. foreign policy more honestly than the neoconservative consensus once permitted. Those are today's highlights. For the full stories and more, visit theamericanconservative.com. Thank you for starting your morning with us.