A week ago today, VP Vance led the U.S. delegation for 21 hours of direct talks with Iran, in the Pakistani city of Islamabad. Those talks were not particularly fruitful. Right now we’re nearing the end of the original two-week ceasefire, and things remain fragile. Although, for some reason the U.S. stock market has been strong over the past 3 weeks, and is now back in the black for 2026.

Paul Krugman had an article today that I think nicely summarizes the state of the war:

“It’s been clear for a while that the United States has basically lost this war. The goal was to achieve regime change, possibly to take Iran’s uranium. Neither of those is going to happen. The Iranian regime is harder line than it was before. Iran has ended up strengthened because it has demonstrated its ability to shut off traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. No way the United States, even under current management, is going to commit ground troops to attempt to really do in Iran’s nuclear program on a sustained basis.

So the indicated strategy was essentially to give up, but claim that something wonderful was accomplished, and that’s certainly something that Trump is good at doing. But he hasn’t been able to pull it off, I think because he is incapable of facing reality. … [T]he U.S. just found out the limits to its power, and they turn out to be closer to our goal than they are to the Iranians’ goal. So we basically have to cut our losses by making a deal that leaves the Iranians with some stuff that they didn’t have before.

He can’t seem to do that. … [W]e are led by people who not only can’t plan a war right, they can’t even successfully execute a surrender. And that’s a really bad omen, not just for the Iran conflict, but for everything else.”

There was a by-election this week in Governor Sherrill’s old seat, the New Jersey 11th. This is a moderate suburban district that Harris won 53-44 in 2024 and in which Sherrill had won re-election 57-41 in 2024. However the victor in the recent open Democratic primary was Analilia Mejia, from the progressive wing of the party. As such many were interested in seeing whether Mejia would be able to continue the recent trend of Democratic margin expansion in by-elections, or whether instead the pendulum would swing back the other way due to her being “too progressive” for her district. She won 60-40, which is being viewed in some circles as a sign that the Democrats can afford to nominate progressives in a broader array of districts.

Two Congressmen resigned this week over sex scandals. The scandal involving Tony Gonzales (R-TX) had been percolating for a long time, so much so that he lost his primary several weeks ago over it. By contrast, the scandal involving Eric Swalwell (D-CA) only broke into the public eye mere days before he fell on his sword. With these resignations, once Mejia is seated the Republican majority will be 218-214.

However the larger impact of Swalwell’s sudden implosion is on the upcoming California gubernatorial race. With Governor Newsom term-limited and Kamala Harris having declined to run, the jungle primary scheduled for early June is wide open. Swalwell had been one of the leading Democratic candidates in a field featuring billionaire and 2020 Presidential gadfly Tom Steyer, former Congresswoman and failed 2024 Senate primary candidate Katie Porter, former HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, former L.A. mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and other minor players. Swalwell’s departure from that race may make it more likely that one candidate from each party will advance to the general; based on recent polling, there was increasing concern among Democrats that without consolidation of the field, the top two vote-getters in the primary could be the two main Republican candidates, even if as a whole the Democratic candidates were to receive as much as 60% of the primary vote.

In world politics, last Sunday Hungarian PM Orban decisively lost the election and is out of power after 16 years; encouragingly, he conceded the evening of the election. Earlier in the week VP Vance had been in Hungary, campaigning for Orban. Open American intervention in another country’s election is unusual enough, but even moreso when it’s in support of the candidate also supported by Russia. It will be very interesting to see the extent to which new Hungarian PM Magyar, a former member of Orban’s party who created his own opposition movement, will encounter difficulties in undoing the damage to institutions wrought by Orban’s authoritarian tendencies. Closer to home, Canadian PM Carney finally has a majority government to work with, after winning three by-elections last week in the wake of having convinced a handful of MPs from parties to both his left and right to cross the floor and join the Liberals.

The Court of International Trade recently had its oral arguments in the Section 122 tariffs case, Oregon v. Trump. From what I have read, the judges seriously engaged with plaintiffs’ arguments on the obsolescence of Section 122 in a world with floating exchange rates. While the invocation of Section 122 tariffs is by law limited to 150 days, I hope that the judges do not use that as an excuse to run out the clock here, but instead provide clear guidance on the meaning of the law. In other tariff news, on Monday the federal government will launch its new system under which importers of record can request refunds of the IEEPA tariffs that were deemed illegal in Learning Resources v. Trump.