Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said his country is engaged in what he described as a ‘total war’ with the U.S., Israel and Europe.

In an interview published Saturday by Iranian state media, Pezeshkian said that he believes the Western powers want to bring Iran ‘to its knees,’ The Times of Israel reported.

‘In my opinion, we are at total war with the United States, Israel and Europe,’ Pezeshkian said. ‘They want to bring our country to its knees.’

Pezeshkian argued that the current conflict is more complex than the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, saying his country is now under pressure ‘from every angle,’ according to The Times of Israel.

‘If one understands it well, this war is far more complex and difficult than that war. In the war with Iraq, the situation was clear, they fired missiles, and we knew where to hit,’ Pezeshkian said, according to The Jerusalem Post. 

‘Here, they are besieging us from every aspect, they are creating problems for us in terms of livelihood, culturally, politically, and security-wise.’

Despite the strain, Pezeshkian claimed Iran’s military emerged stronger following its June conflict with Israel, according to The Times of Israel.

‘Our beloved military forces are doing their jobs with strength and now, in terms of equipment and manpower, despite all the problems we have, they are stronger than when they attacked. So if they want to attack, they will naturally face a more decisive response,’ he said.

The interview with Pezeshkian was released ahead of a planned meeting this coming week at Mar-a-Lago between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump, according to The Jerusalem Post.

Tensions remain high following a brief but intense air conflict in June that was kicked off by Israel. 

The fighting resulted in roughly 1,100 deaths in Iran, including senior military commanders and nuclear scientists, while Iranian missile attacks killed 28 people in the Jewish State.

On June 22, President Donald Trump announced U.S. forces had launched attacks on Iranian nuclear sites, including Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan.

‘Our objective was the destruction of Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacity and a stop to the nuclear threat posed by the world’s number one state sponsor of terror,’ the president said. ‘Tonight, I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular military success. Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.’

A US-brokered ceasefire between Iran and Israel took effect on June 24.

Fox News Digital’s Landon Mion contributed to this report.

 Millions of Christians in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), spending Christmas under the reported threat of persecution, kidnapping, sexual violence and in some cases, death from Islamist militants, have seen Friday’s U.S. strikes on Islamic State militants in Nigeria as a real sign that President Trump is serious in his efforts to stop the killing of Africa’s Christians.

Over 16 million Christians are estimated to have been displaced and ripped from their homes across the region. The alleged release of 130 kidnapped schoolchildren in Nigeria this week has done little to reduce fears, as many on the continent try to worship at Christmas.

But this year, Fox News Digital has highlighted the catastrophe from Africa on multiple occasions. The situation led to senior members of Congress, including Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas., Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., and ultimately, President Donald Trump who threatened to send U.S. troops into the worst-affected country, Nigeria, ‘guns-a-blazing’, to stop the killing of Christians, has shone a light on the violence.

In Africa this Christmas, so far there’s reportedly little sign of improvement. ‘The militant Islamist onslaught across SSA is a catastrophe of global proportions unfolding before us,’ Henrietta Blyth, CEO of Open Doors UK & Ireland, told Fox News Digital this week.

Open Doors is a global Christian charity supporting Christians persecuted for their faith.

Blyth continued, ‘the last year has seen a non-stop stream of reports from sub-Saharan Africa. (including) reports of militant Islamist groups brutally attacking, among others, defenseless Christian communities.’

‘At Open Doors, we have been sounding the alarm through our Arise Africa campaign. We’ve prayed repeatedly that the campaign of terror will reach public awareness.’

Referring to Nigeria and the thousands of Christians reported to have been killed there each year and the speeches, articles and posts against the violence, Open Doors’ Blyth states, ‘There is no sign that this has abated in 2025’.

‘The lack of global outrage and action on this issue is a moral disgrace,’ South Africa’s Chief Rabbi, Dr. Warren Goldstein, told Fox News Digital. He added, ‘It seems as if black lives do not matter if they are murdered by Islamists in Africa. The persecution of Christians in Africa needs to be seen in its global context. It is part of a multi-continental jihadi war on the ‘infidels’ — Jews and Christians — and on Western values.’

He continued ‘it is a world war, with Israel at the epicenter of the fire of the jihadi forces of Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and others. The Islamist war on Christians in Africa is another front of this world war that stretches from Sudan in the north to Mozambique in the South.’

Fox News Digital has highlighted where persecution has hit hardest in Africa in 2025:

NIGERIA

According to Open Doors, the continent’s most populous nation saw the worst persecution in Africa in 2025, with ‘non-stop stories of deadly attacks and kidnappings’ across Nigeria’s north and Middle Belt — a litany of villages torched, citizens raped, abducted, shot and beheaded.

Pope Leo XIV spoke out this year against killings attributed to Muslim Fulani tribesmen in Nigeria’s Benue State in June, saying ‘Some 200 people were murdered, with extraordinary cruelty’. 

Bishop Wilfred Anagbe’s Makurdi Diocese in north-central Nigeria is almost exclusively Christian. But the constant and escalating attacks by Islamist Fulani militants led him to testify at a congressional hearing  in Washington in March. Back in Nigeria, he was threatened, and some 20 of his parishioners killed.

THE DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO (DRC)

The war-torn country is Christian, yet the faithful are being targeted by jihadists. In February, terrorists linked to Islamic State from the so-called ADF group, who want the eastern part of the country to become a Muslim caliphate, rounded up 70 Christians and reportedly beheaded them — in a church. In September, at least Christians were reportedly slaughtered by jihadists at a funeral and in surrounding fields.

SUDAN

Sudan’s estimated 2 million Christians make up an estimated 4% of the country’s population,

Like the rest of Sudan’s people, they face chronic food shortages and the horror of a yearslong war. But Christians are also allegedly singled out for discrimination and persecution by both sides in the conflict.

A senior Sudanese church leader  told Fox News Digital that in the Darfur city of El Fasher, that ‘now Christians are eating animal feed and grass. No wheat, no rice, nothing can get in.’

CAMEROON

A civil conflict and weak governance have allowed armed militants to step into the vacuum of law and order, Open Doors reported. In the far north, Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province regularly swoop into villages in overnight raids, killing, abducting and destroying. Thousands of people have fled their homes for displacement camps.

Ali, a villager, said ‘It never ends. I want it to end, but it doesn’t. We must sleep in the mountains for safety.’ 

MOZAMBIQUE

Situated in the southwest of the continent, Mozambique has a Christian population of . Islamic State Mozambique is causing havoc in the far north, targeting Christian communities, burning their churches and destroying homes. The killings have multiplied this year, and thousands more are fleeing their homes, joining more than who have already been displaced.

In one mass attack on the village of Napala in October, Open Doors reported militants killed 20 Christians and displaced some 2,000. A local pastor described how four elderly sisters were tied up and burned to death inside a house.

On the airstrikes in Nigeria, Open Doors’ Henrietta Blyth told Fox News Digital, ‘a military operation like this is not going to provide any sort of quick fix for decades of violence. The Nigerian government must pursue lasting solutions that ensure peace, protection of civilians and religious freedom for everyone.’

Chief Rabbi Goldstein concluded, ‘The West can only win this war if it can find the moral clarity to call it by its name and see all the theaters of war as part of the same fight.’

Generally speaking, nobody outside of Washington, D.C., brunch spots cares very much what happens at think tanks. But recent upheavals at the Heritage Foundation are not only making news, they are potentially framing what the Republican Party will look like after President Trump leaves office.

The current kerfuffle at Heritage, the nation’s leading conservative think tank, began on Oct. 30, when its president, Kevin Roberts, gave a speech defending Tucker Carlson for interviewing a snarky young Holocaust denier.

‘The Heritage Foundation didn’t become the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement by canceling our own people or policing the consciences of Christians, and we won’t start doing that now,’ Roberts said.

A pitter-patter of outraged resignations came almost immediately, even after Roberts apologized for his remarks, but last week, almost two months later, nearly an entire division of Heritage’s legal and economic experts jumped ship to former Vice President Mike Pence’s Advancing American Freedom (AAF).

The significant question in all of this is whether Roberts playing footsie with antisemites is the real or only reason why so many top experts joined the exodus to Pence’s outfit, and there is some reason to be dubious.

Take for example Trump’s zealous use of tariffs in international trade. This kind of protectionism is constitutionally anathema to exactly the type of conservative economist who prowled the halls of Heritage, but the think tank itself was standing by the president’s policies.

Add to this that Heritage seems to be leaning heavily into Vice President JD VanceJD Vance’s 2028 presidential ambitions, in fact Roberts’ original video may have been intended for the veep who is close with Carlson and has made fighting globalism and saving small industrial towns the centerpiece of his national message.

The problem is that most of the longtime Heritage economists really like globalism and think saving ‘Nowhere, Ohio’ from oblivion is a pipe dream. Now, they truly have no seat at the table, either at Heritage or in the Trump administration.

Such tensions also exist in foreign policy and immigration, and a cynic might suggest that the Heritage bleedout is just another example of conservatives with strong ideological differences from Trump deciding it’s no longer working to cozy up to him, and taking whatever current moral outrage is available as an offramp.

This is exactly what Pence did after the Capitol riots of Jan. 6, 2021, leading him to found AAF, which, by the way, is as anti-tariffs as the day is long.

In this fight for the soul of the Republican Party and conservative movement, both Heritage and AAF are redefining what a think tank is and what it does, in important ways.

Traditionally, wealthy donors would give money to guys with good hair to get elected and also fund bald guys at think tanks, who were rarely seen or heard from, to produce the actual policy. But voters have seen through this, leading the think tanks to more direct outreach to the public.

In the 2024 election, Heritage’s ‘Project 2025’ was a headline story for months, something completely unprecedented in the history of presidential politics for a think tank. Today, through moves such as hiring Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice, Heritage is committing to more populism and activism and less back-room algebra.

AAF is starting to play this game too. The think tank put out a satirical X post comparing the flood of Heritage staffers coming their way to a college football team dominating in the transfer portal, another hint that more than moral outrage was at play here.

The headwind that AAF is likely to run into with conservative voters in their anti-populism efforts is that populism is popular, and globalism, along with many other core tenets of the pre-Trump GOP, isn’t.

The best chance for AAF, and it’s not a bad one, is to focus on lowering prices by lowering tariff. But a conservative think tank yelling that prices are too high while the GOP holds the White House and Congress is a nightmare for Republican midterm hopes.

The more vital question is what American voters want more, deeper discounts on foreign goods from China or functional communities where they can raise their families? For AAF to succeed it must address the latter, not just the former.

In Vance’s, and increasingly Heritage’s, vision of America, our small industrial towns see a revival through tariffs and foreign investment. In AAF’s vision, those towns may continue to wither, but Americans are free to move to where the jobs and abundance are.

Neither proponents of these visions can guarantee the success of their proposed programs, but the ‘save our towns’ side is currently in power and ascending. If AAF wants to change that, it needs more than moral outrage. It needs to convince Americans that globalism really wasn’t so bad, and that it is time to return to it.