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US Secretary of State Marco Rubio says the US has not told the Iranian national team that it cannot play.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Washington has no objections to Iranian players participating in the 2026 FIFA World Cup, but he added the players will not be allowed to bring people with ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) with them.

Since the United States-Israeli war on Iran began on February 28, Iran’s participation in this summer’s edition of FIFA’s global showpiece has been in doubt because all of the country’s group-stage matches are scheduled to be played in the United States.

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“Nothing from the US has told them they can’t come,” Rubio told reporters.

“The problem with Iran would be not their athletes. It would be some of the other people they would want to bring with them, some of whom have ties to the IRGC. We may not be able to let them in, but not the athletes themselves,” Rubio said.

“They can’t bring a bunch of IRGC terrorists into our country and pretend that they are journalists and athletic trainers,” Rubio added.

Washington has designated the IRGC as a “foreign terrorist organisation”.

US President Donald Trump, speaking alongside Rubio, added that his administration “would not want to affect the athletes”.

The World Cup is set to begin on June 11 across the US, Mexico and Canada.

Speculation about Iran’s participation has been rife, with officials from both Iran and the US weighing in.

In a statement on Wednesday, however, Iran’s government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani said all necessary arrangements for the team’s participation in the tournament have been ensured by the Ministry of Sports and Youth.

An envoy for Trump, though, has been quoted as suggesting that Italy, who failed to qualify for the World Cup for a third straight edition, should replace Iran at this year’s World Cup.

Paolo Zampolli, an Italian-American who is ⁠a US envoy for global relations, told The Financial Times that he made the suggestion to both Trump and FIFA President Gianni Infantino.

“I’m an Italian native, and it would be a dream to see the Azzurri at a US-hosted tournament. With four titles, they have the pedigree to justify inclusion,” Zampolli, who has no official connection with the World Cup ⁠or Italian football, said earlier this week.

Italian Sports Minister Andrea Abodi has rebuked the idea, saying “it ‌is not appropriate … You qualify on the pitch,” while Economy Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti described the concept as “shameful”.

Iran qualified for a fourth successive World Cup last year but, after the start of the war, requested that FIFA move the team’s three group matches from the US to Mexico – a suggestion that was rejected.

Iran is now seemingly ⁠proceeding as planned.

“We are preparing and making arrangements for the World Cup, but we are obedient to the ⁠decisions of the authorities,” Iranian football federation President Mehdi Taj told reporters at a pro-government rally in Tehran on Wednesday.

Taipei, Taiwan — Japan’s southern island of Kyushu is known for its volcanic landscape and tonkatsu ramen, but the popular tourist destination is ground zero for one of the greatest shifts in Japan’s defence strategy since 1947, when it formally renounced the use of war to settle international disputes.

In late March, Japan deployed long-range missiles to Kumamoto Prefecture on the island’s southwest coast. Unlike previous defence installations, these missiles could hit China, reflecting the fact that Beijing has ranked as Japan’s top national security threat above North Korea and Russia since 2019.

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Defence Minister Shinjiro Koizumi told reporters at the time that “Japan faces the most severe and complex security environment in the post-war era” and the country must strengthen its “deterrence and responsiveness”.

Known as the “southern shield,” the new front in Japan’s defence strategy has seen the Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF), as the country’s military is formally known, deploy a range of weapons platforms as well as electronic warfare and air assets in southern Japan and its southwest outlying islands.

“The balance is changing. The defence posture has completely shifted towards the southwest, so the north is much less prioritised,” Suzuki Kazuto, director of the Institute of Geoeconomics, an independent think tank in Tokyo, said.

The ‘southern shield’

Much of Japan’s growing defence budget, which hit a record $58bn for the fiscal year 2026, has been allocated towards this build-up, he said. The strategy focuses heavily on the Nansei or Ryukyu Islands, which run from Kyushu to within 100km (62 miles) of Taiwan.

These islands form a natural barrier dividing the East China Sea from the Philippine Sea, and are a critical part of the United States-led “First Island Chain” maritime defence strategy, which aims to keep Chinese forces out of the Pacific.

While the “First Island Chain” strategy has its roots in the Cold War, Tokyo is worried about increased Chinese military activity in the Asia Pacific, including the East China Sea and the Taiwan Strait.

The “southern shield” aims to create “anti-access or area-denial layers along the First Island Chain, complicating potential Chinese operations near Taiwan or in the East China Sea,” said Jonathan Ping, a political economist whose work focuses on statecraft at Australia’s Bond University.

It also incorporates a major shift in Japan’s defence policy towards acquiring “counterstrike capability” that would allow the JSDF to hit back if attacked, stretching the legal definition of what constitutes “self-defence”. These kinds of contradictions define the modern JSDF, which is a military in all but name and ranks alongside South Korea and France in the 2026 Global Firepower Index.

A military that uses ‘legal gymnastics’

The JSDF emerged from Japan’s post-war police, at a time when Japan was reckoning with the Imperial Army’s brutal wartime atrocities during the US occupation, according to Soyoung Kim, an assistant professor who researches Japan’s post-war security policy at Nagoya University.

JSDF members are legally classified as “special national government employees,” and until the end of the Cold War, focused largely on humanitarian and disaster relief. Their role began to change after the Gulf War, when Japanese politicians felt humiliated by their inability to offer military support to the US-led coalition, Kim said.

In the decades since, public attitudes about the role of the JSDF have begun to shift, Kim said, amid Japan’s ongoing territorial dispute with China over the Senkaku or Diaoyu Islands. The Japanese public also regularly receives alerts each time North Korea test-fires a missile, as a reminder that Pyongyang still poses a major threat to Japan.

“There is increasingly greater acceptance or perhaps resignation to greater mission capability of the SDF,” Kim told Al Jazeera.

Over the past decade, the Japanese government has slowly moved the needle on what the JSDF can legally do, starting with a 2014 constitutional ruling that found Japan could participate in the “collective self-defence” of its allies.

“Japan has largely avoided formal amendments, choosing instead to ‘reinterpret’ the text. This makes Japan unique not just for its pacifism, but for the ‘legal gymnastics’ required to maintain a modern military under a constitution that explicitly forbids one,” said Taniguchi Tomohiko, who served as a special adviser to the cabinet of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

In 2022, Japan’s national security strategy was expanded to include “counterstrike capabilities,” which means it can hit back if attacked. As part of this strategy, Japan is due to acquire 400 US-made Tomahawk missiles, which can be launched from submarines and naval vessels.

The US, not just China, is driving Japan’s shift

Tokyo will release the next phase of its national security strategy later this year, covering 2026 to 2030. The document is expected to incorporate lessons from Ukraine and Iran about drones and supply chain chokepoints, according to Suzuki at the Institute of Geoeconomics. In its latest legal backflip, Japan separately approved the export of lethal weapons this month as it moves to build up a domestic drone industry.

While some of these changes are a response to the rise of neighbouring China, they also reflect growing concern in Tokyo about its longtime ally, the US, and its ability or willingness to defend its allies, say analysts.

Japan has historically fallen under the protection of Washington’s nuclear umbrella, but China’s rapid military and nuclear expansion has “reduced the credibility of the US extended deterrence,” according to Kei Koga, an expert in East Asian security and the US-Japan alliance, at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

“Japan wants to play a more kind of active role to compensate for the relative gains of China,” he said, which includes a second-strike nuclear capability – the ability to retaliate after a nuclear attack. China’s close ties to Russia and North Korea have raised the stakes further, he said.

Japanese politicians are also worried about the long-running question of whether a conflict will break out over Taiwan, a self-ruled democracy of 23 million people. China claims Taiwan as a province and has pledged to annex it by peace or by force.

US military assessments state it will likely be capable of doing so by next year. Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said in December that a Taiwan conflict could prove to be a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan, which hosts multiple US military bases.

Some of Japan’s outlying islands also lie closer to Taiwan than the Japanese mainland. And under US President Donald Trump, many of the longstanding assumptions about the US commitment to defend allies like Japan are changing.

Whether Trump would intervene to help Taiwan is even less certain. Washington does not formally recognise Taipei, although it has pledged to help Taiwan defend itself under the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act. Known as “strategic ambiguity,” the policy stops short of committing US forces, but it has long been seen as a credible enough threat to deter China from moving on the much smaller island.

Trump’s shift towards an “America First” policy and combative relationship with longtime allies in Europe has worried Japan. A 2025 survey by Japan’s Asahi Shimbun indicated that 77 percent of respondents doubt that the US would protect Japan in a military crisis.

“Everything is focused on the American interest and American defence, so defending other countries is not the priority,” Suzuki told Al Jazeera.

Growing US scepticism in Japan has pushed Tokyo to shore up alliances with other US allies like the Philippines and Australia, while also dimming some of the public criticism about Japan’s military build-up.

“For many years, the opposition assumed that the United States would come and rescue Japan, and therefore we don’t need to have more than self-defence,” Suzuki said. “Increasingly, people are realising this assumption is too optimistic, and we need to have at least the minimum capability to have deterrence and counterstrike capability.”

The New York Times published a detailed account this week of Iran’s new leadership structure, based on interviews with more than 20 Iranian officials, former officials, Revolutionary Guard members and individuals close to the new supreme leader. It deserves a careful read, but not for the reasons the Times intends.

The piece describes the new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, as gravely wounded, communicating via handwritten notes passed through a motorcycle courier chain, mentally sharp but with injuries that make speaking difficult, deliberately avoiding video out of concern for appearing weak. The key details of his condition come from unnamed Iranian officials. There is no photograph, no medical record, no independent verification of any kind. The article does not ask readers to weigh the incentives behind those sources. It presents the account as fact.

Reporting from inside an authoritarian state, especially one at war, where the regime decides who speaks to Western journalists and what they are permitted to say, requires deep scepticism that the article does not apply. The sources describing Mojtaba’s condition have a direct interest in the picture they are painting: a living, mentally engaged supreme leader who has simply delegated, but remains very much involved, during a difficult period. That picture serves the regime well. It preserves the fiction of functioning leadership. Perhaps this account is accurate. But reporting sourced entirely from people with a direct interest in what you believe deserves a disclaimer that the Times did not provide.

The sourcing problem would be significant on its own. But the historical framing underneath it is far more consequential.

The article states that power has shifted to “an entrenched, hard-line military” and that “the broad influence of the clerics is waning”. The implication, never stated outright but structurally present throughout, is that this represents a radicalisation of what came before. It does not.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the cleric who led Iran for 35 years, advanced Iran’s nuclear programme to the edge of weaponisation, built the ballistic missile programme, the drone programme, and the network of proxies including Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis and the Shia militias in Iraq that threatened Israel, the Gulf states, and American forces across the region for decades. He crushed the Green Movement in 2009. His regime executed protesters in the crackdown that followed the 2022 uprising. He directed the IRGC’s Quds Force under Qassem Soleimani, whose operations killed and maimed American soldiers for years. The IRGC was not a force that the clerics restrained. It was the instrument through which the clerical vision was executed. Every major missile programme, every proxy network, every centrifuge facility was built under clerical direction.

Calling the current moment a shift from clerical moderation to military hardline is a rewriting of 45 years of history.

When President Trump says the new Iranian leaders may be more reasonable, he is not being naive about their character. He is making a harder observation: that after taking unprecedented military action against the regime, the people now making decisions in Tehran may have no viable path except the negotiating table. That is not a statement about Iranian goodwill. It is a statement about Iranian options. I remain sceptical that a real deal will materialise. But you do not find out without trying.

If Western policymakers and the analysts who shape their thinking come away believing that by going to war we have empowered hardliners instead of pragmatists within the Iranian system, they are drawing exactly the conclusion Tehran wants them to draw.

A claim repeated in media commentary and on Capitol Hill held that the United States was not already at war with Iran before the February strikes. That claim has always been a fiction. Iran had been waging war on the United States and its allies for decades, through terror proxies, attacks on American troops and a nuclear programme designed to hold the region hostage. Pretending otherwise did not make Americans or our allies in the Gulf and Israel safer. It made the eventual reckoning harder to explain and easier to mischaracterise as aggression rather than a long-overdue response to a severe threat that had been growing for 45 years.

A portrait that treats the clerics and the IRGC as distinct forces, one restraining and one radical, erases 45 years of evidence that they were always the same project pursuing the same ends. It helps the regime frame what is happening on its own terms. That serves Tehran, not the truth.

I served as the White House Middle East envoy from 2017 to 2019 and have remained engaged with regional leaders and diplomats in the years since. The Iranian regime, across every iteration, so-called reformist presidents, hardline presidents, pragmatic foreign ministers and IRGC commanders, pursued the same objectives. The faces changed. The goal did not. Anyone waiting for the clerical establishment to pull Iran towards moderation has not been paying attention for 45 years. The clerics built this. The IRGC executed it. They are not in tension. They are in partnership. The only thing that has changed is that sustained military pressure has left them with fewer options than they have ever had.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.