UNITED STATES PERSPECTIVE

Washington, May 28, 2026. For the Trump administration, the Israeli announcement of the elimination of a top Hamas military official fits into a strategic arc in which Washington is a central actor. As Israel claims this targeted strike, the United States is conducting its own offensive operations in the region: on the night of May 27, the US military conducted new strikes in Iran, targeting a military site that US officials believed posed a threat to US forces and commercial maritime traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, according to information provided by a US official to Reuters and HuffPost.

This simultaneity is not coincidental in Washington's eyes. The Trump administration has accompanied its military actions with increased economic pressure: on the same May 27, new sanctions were imposed on Tehran, targeting this time a newly created Iranian agency seeking to control navigation through the Strait of Hormuz. The White House explicitly places these measures within its maximum economic pressure campaign conducted in parallel with the war.

The coherence of the sequence is, however, tested on the domestic front. Senator Elizabeth Warren revealed that the State Department did not request the US Transportation Command (TRANSCOM) to organize the evacuation of non-federal US citizens present in the Middle East since the start of hostilities with Iran — an operational gap that the administration struggles to explain. TRANSCOM's responses to Warren, provided exclusively to CNBC, highlight the disconnect between the rhetoric of control and the reality of interagency coordination.

Meanwhile, the economic repercussions of the war are beginning to materialize for American households: Fidelity reports an increase in early withdrawals from 401(k) accounts, financial pressures pushing more savers to tap into their retirement savings, potentially incurring losses related to market volatility during the first weeks of the US-Iran conflict.

In this context of multi-front escalation, the elimination of the Hamas leader is presented by Washington's allies as a shared tactical success. However, the question of diplomatic accountability — toward which outcome the US and Israel are jointly steering this sequence — remains unanswered by the administration.