newyorker

After the first cycle of attacks between Israel and Iran, on Friday, the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, made a direct appeal to Iranians to rise up against theocratic rule. Operation Rising Lion—the code name for Israel’s sweeping assault on Iran’s nuclear facilities and military leaders—was “clearing the path” for them, he said, in a video released by his administration. “The time has come,” he said, “to unite around your flag and your historic legacy by standing up for your freedom from an evil and oppressive regime.” That regime, he added, has “never been weaker.” Then, in Farsi, with Israel’s flag behind him, Netanyahu invoked the rallying cry that mobilized tens of thousands of Iranians during the nationwide“Woman, Life, Freedom” protestsin 2022. “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi,” he said. On Saturday, he claimed, in another video, that senior Iranian leaders were already “packing their bags” and preparing to flee.

Israel’s campaign, militarily and rhetorically, has quickly evolved beyond its initial targets. Over the weekend, it hit Iran’s energy facilities, including a gas depot and an oil refinery, triggering huge fires and spewing smoke across the sprawling capital of about ten million people. “Tehran is burning,” the Israeli Defense Minister, Israel Katz, boasted on X. Energy resources were struck in other cities, too, sabotaging Iran’s main sources of revenue. Israeli officials also began telling local and foreign media outlets that assassinating Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader since 1989, was “not off limits.” (President Donald Trump reportedly vetoed the idea, but the fact that Israeli leaders even discussed it with their counterparts in Washington reflects how far they’re willing to go.)

Israel has long had military superiority over Iran. In the past two years, it has conducted brazen air strikes and novel covert operations against the Islamic Republic’s allies across the Middle East, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen. It has assassinated senior political leaders and killed thousands of fighters. Israel has even more momentum now. But achieving conclusive results will be tough—whether that’s obliterating Iran’s nuclear program, destroying its sophisticated arsenal of missiles, crippling its economy, or spurring a counter-revolution.

“The initial attack was so spectacularly successful that it’s hard not to raise your goals,” General Kenneth (Frank) McKenzie, Jr., who led U.S. Central Command from 2019 to 2022, told me. But, he cautioned, “You’ve got to know what’s feasible.” Israel can “significantly” degrade Iran’s nuclear program, “but I don’t think it’s possible to completely eliminate it.” In 2020, McKenzie carried out President Trump’s order to killGeneral Qassem Suleimani, the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force, who masterminded dozens of attacks on U.S. targets. The Quds Force has continued to orchestrate attacks on U.S. personnel in the region, however.

Ehud Barak, a former Israeli Prime Minister and a retired general, estimated that Israel could delay Iran’s nuclear program only by several weeks. “Even the U.S. cannot delay them by more than a few months,” Barak said, on Friday, on CNN. Iran has dispersed its nuclear program—which Tehran claims is only for peaceful energy production—among different parts of the country. One of its primary facilities is at Fordow, which is buried more than two hundred feet under the Zagros Mountains, near the holy city of Qom.

Israel and the international community have long worried that Iran’s program could be expanded to build a bomb. In Washington, the Arms Control Association, a nonpartisan group led by nuclear experts and former U.S. officials, warned that Operation Rising Lion could backfire by “strengthening Tehran’s resolve to advance its sensitive nuclear activities and possibly proceed to weaponization, a step it has not taken up to this point.”

Israel’s elimination of Iran’s military brass may be a setback, “but it is not a strategy for ending Iran’s program,” Wendy Sherman, who led the U.S. team that negotiated the nuclear deal signed by Iran and the world’s six major powers, in 2015, told me. (Trump unilaterally withdrew from that deal, which placed limits on Iran’s uranium enrichment in exchange for economic-sanctions relief, in 2018.) In just two days, Israel assassinated the chief of staff of the Iranian armed forces, the top commander of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the head of the country’s aerospace-and-missile program. “The Supreme Leader will just replace them with their deputies, and then their deputies, and their deputies after that,” Sherman said.

The odds of Israeli-inspired regime change also seem small right now. On X, Danny Citrinowicz, the former head of Iran analysis for Israeli military intelligence, warned that Netanyahu’s government has embarked on a war based on the “illusion” that it can suck in the U.S. for the “hidden goal” of overthrowing the Islamic Republic. “The bigger problem,” he wrote, is “how exactly . . . Israel intend[s] to end the war and preserve its achievements without entering a war of attrition” that becomes open-ended, like itswar in Gaza, with no clear exit strategy.

In 2003, President George W. Bush launched Operation Iraqi Freedom to destroy Baghdad’s nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. The implicit goal was also to topple then President Saddam Hussein. However, Iraq turned out not to have any weapons of mass destruction—and the U.S. was stuck there for eight turbulent years, an occupation that generated the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, which was led by prisoners detained by American forces. Israel’s opening salvos in the current conflict are “reminiscent of our shock and awe going into Iraq, when everyone thought we were so powerful,” Sherman noted. “And then shock and awe became mired down.” In any country under attack, people tend to rally around the flag. Persian nationalism dates back some five thousand years, when tribes united to create the world’s first major empire. “I don’t think that dies easily,” Sherman said. “And you don’t know what you’re creating when you try to destroy.”

For more than three decades, I’ve had a running dialogue with Nasser Hadian, a U.S.-educated political scientist who has taught at both Columbia and the University of Tehran. We spoke again—I in Washington, he in Tehran—this weekend, via WhatsApp. About eighty per cent of Iran’s ninety-two million people oppose the country’s hard-line leadership, he said, but only a “very small number” would embrace Netanyahu’s call for regime change. Israel’s onslaught makes any “attempt to replace the government” less likely, at least for now. Even with possible unrest among minorities on the geographic and political periphery of Iran, such as the Baloch and the Kurds, the Iranian state still “has enough support to survive,” he said.

Jonathan Panikoff, a former career U.S. intelligence officer, recently wrote that many Israelis once thought political change in Iran would “prompt a new and better day,” because “nothing could be worse than the current theocratic regime.” But, he cautioned, history proves the alternatives can “always be worse”; the more likely outcome, Panikoff argued, in a piece for the Atlantic Council, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, is not a democracy but a “Revolutionary Guard Corps–istan” that is even more radical. “In such a case, Israel might find itself in a perpetual, ongoing, and far more intense war that is no longer in the shadows, as it has been for years.” Or, other experts are warning, Iran could devolve into a failing state bogged down in internal chaos, as happened in Iraq, with unintended consequences that rippled throughout the region.

There is, as yet, no organized or disciplined opposition group—either in Iran or in exile—capable of marching into Tehran and seizing power, Ali Vaez, the Iran project director for the International Crisis Group, told me. Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last Shah, who was overthrown in the 1979 Revolution, has lived outside Washington, D.C., for more than four decades. I once asked him at a Washington dinner party what language he dreamed in. “English or French,” he replied. He couldn’t remember dreaming in Farsi.

Now under siege, Tehran has few options. Its only “good strategy” is not to appear willing to back down, Vaez said. Its vast energy resources and geostrategic position in the Persian Gulf do provide some leverage, and oil prices have surged since hostilities erupted. The price of U.S. crude jumped seven per cent in the first twenty-four hours. Iran has the world’s third-largest oil reserves; it also controls the Strait of Hormuz, through which about a fifth of global energy supplies pass each day. If the war spills beyond the Middle East, Vaez said, Tehran may be hoping that international energy markets become even more rattled and that “Trump would blink first and get Israel to stop.”

There appears to be no off-ramp yet, as the destruction and death toll mount in both countries. In Iran, more than two hundred people have been killed, and thousands more injured. Israel, in turn, has been deeply shaken by retaliatory missile attacks, which have killed at least twenty and injured hundreds. On Saturday, Iran pulled out of nuclear negotiations that had been scheduled to take place in Oman the next day. The Trump Administration is insisting that diplomacy is not dead, however. On Sunday, the President said, “Iran and Israel should make a deal, and will make a deal.” Many calls and meetings were happening behind the scenes, he claimed, on Truth Social. “I do a lot, and never get credit for anything, but that’s OK, the PEOPLE understand. MAKE THE MIDDLE EAST GREAT AGAIN!”

On Sunday, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, charged that Israel is undermining attempts at diplomacy on nuclear issues. Tehran has been willing to limit its controversial program, but also does not want to lose its right to enrich uranium at low levels for peaceful applications, he told foreign diplomats. (As a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran has a right to produce civilian nuclear energy.) Iran needs nuclear energy to meet the demands of its growing population; sporadic blackouts are already commonplace.

In April, the Trump Administration set a sixty-day limit on negotiations for a new nuclear deal. (The 2015 pact took two years of tortured diplomacy and ended up as a hundred-and-fifty-nine-page document, plus annexes.) Israel’s attack on Friday happened on day sixty-one, Trump noted. Hadian, the political scientist, told me that many Iranians now believe that the U.S. engaged in “coördinated deception” with Israel. Just getting back to the table will be hard. Reaching a new deal will almost certainly be even harder, despite Iran’s losses. Revolutionary regimes are inherently paranoid. Like Trump’s efforts to end Russia’s war in Ukraine or the war in Gaza, the President is unlikely to be able to end the new hostilities—in an enduring way—quickly. ♦

When a “purchasing group” won a ninety-five-million-dollar jackpot, the victory caused a scandal in a state where opposition to legal gambling remains widespread.

On Wednesday, April 19, 2023, the Lotto Texas jackpot was seventy-three million dollars. There was no winner that night—there hadn’t been a winner for the past ninety-one drawings—and so the pool of money rolled over. By the next drawing, that Saturday, it had reached ninety-five million. Dawn Nettles started getting worried. For the jackpot to have grown so quickly, sales volume must have been ten times what Nettles thought was normal. “I knew right then,” she told me. “Somebody was buying all the combinations.”

Nettles is seventy-four, with cropped copper hair and the bearing of a gently exasperated elementary-school teacher. She lives in Garland, a suburb of Dallas, with her husband, a flight instructor, and she devotes her days to theLotto Report, a publication closely tracking the Texas Lottery. In the three decades since she started theReport, Nettles has evolved from being an enthusiast of the lottery to perhaps its most biting critic.

There are nearly twenty-six million possible combinations for Lotto Texas; Powerball, in comparison, has nearly three hundred million. A player, or a group of players, with the financial and logistical resources can effectively guarantee a win—and, if the prize pool is big enough, a hefty profit. This idea struck Nettles as immensely unfair. That week, she bought more tickets than she had in years. “I kept saying, ‘God, come on, let me hold the winning ticket so these people don’t come out ahead,’ ” she said.

That Saturday, the Texas Lottery Commission put out a press release celebrating the “rare and very exciting opportunity for our players”: the biggest Lotto Texas jackpot in more than a decade. “Players are turning out in droves to have the exclusive chance at winning the largest jackpot prize on the continent,” Gary Grief, the lottery’s executive director, said. Nettles posted an update to theLotto Reportwebsite. “I fear tonight will be a very sad night for Texas Lottery players,” shewrote. “Now the Texas Lottery is probably going to be successful in screwing every player and retailer that resides in Texas.”

There are plenty of Texans who oppose the lottery for moral reasons. Nettles is not one of them. Some of her earliest memories involve accompanying her grandmother to a bingo hall in Wichita Falls; at one point, she told me, she considered Las Vegas her “home away from home.” She became interested in small-scale publishing, and went on to run a real-estate magazine calledUnexaggerated Homes of Dallas, in which, she said, “builders could not use adjectives—what you see is what you get.” Shortly after Texas launched its lottery, in 1992, Nettles began producing theLotto Report, a print newsletter that she likened to the racing forms sold at racetracks. Gamblers are mystics at heart, and lottery players see all sorts of patterns in the supposedly random sequences of winning numbers. TheLotto Reportprovided fodder for their scrying. “It was basically telling a story about all the numbers, what’s been drawn with what, what’s overdue, what the good pairs are,” she said. “Just a complete, thorough deal on the numbers.”

Nettles came to feel that the Texas Lottery was being badly run, and was perhaps even corrupt. TheLotto Reportbecame something of a watchdog publication, railing against rule changes and the lottery commission’s wasteful spending. The website version launched in 1998, and its look hasn’t changed much in the intervening decades. Its aesthetic could be summed up as “crank-adjacent”: there is an overwhelming amount of erratically capitalized and bolded text, punctuated with exclamations like “Unreal!” and “Unbelievable!” and “If you have high blood pressure, don’t read any further!” In 2014, NettlestoldtheTexasTribunethat she was spending fourteen to sixteen hours a day keeping tabs on the lottery. She showed up at commission meetings, made public-records requests, and scrutinized the director’s spending. She lobbied against a rule revision that allowed winners to remain anonymous and accused the commission of not paying winners their full share. (After an internal investigation, the lottery commission concluded that it had followed policy.) At one point, she says, the lottery removed her from its media list, so she no longer got official results via fax. “I thought, Fine, I’ll show you. So I got me a satellite feed so I could watch the drawings in real time,” she said. Rob Kohler, a former employee of the Texas Lottery, told me that, early in his career, he’d planned a conference for the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries. He got word that a group of protesters had shown up. “I was, like, Good Lord,whocould be protesting this conference?” he said. “And there was Dawn Nettles.”

As Nettles had predicted, on April 22nd, someone won the ninety-five-million-dollar jackpot. Grief, the Texas Lottery director, soon acknowledged that “purchasing groups” had been involved. The bulk buy was recognized as unfair but legal; the lottery paid out the prize money, which, after taxes, amounted to nearly fifty-eight million dollars. (The HoustonChronicleeventuallyreportedthat a London-based gambling syndicate had bankrolled the operation.) Two years later, it has become a full-blown scandal. The Texas Rangers have been called in to investigate what Dan Patrick, Texas’s lieutenant governor, has called “the biggest theft from the people of Texas in the history of Texas.” (No criminal charges have been filed; the lawyer that represents Rook TX, the Delaware L.L.C. that claimed the jackpot, has said that “all applicable laws, rules and regulations were followed.”)

At least some of the credit for the recent scrutiny of the Texas Lottery is due to Nettles’s persistence. As she saw it, if she had figured out before the drawing that a bulk buy was in the works, how could the Texas Lottery not have known? And, if the commissioners had known, why had they let it happen? She kept calling Kohler, who, after leaving the Texas Lottery, became the state’s top anti-gambling lobbyist, working for the Baptist-affiliated Christian Life Commission. “Bless her heart, she was just busting my chops,” Kohler told me. “If folks would have taken the time to listen to her, instead of taking her suggestions as an affront, well, I tell you, we’d never be where we’re at right now.”

The most consequential political battles in Texas happen not between Democrats and Republicans—there’s not much suspense in a state so thoroughly dominated by one party—but within Republican factions. Gambling is one of the subjects that reveals ideological fault lines: pro-business Republicans frame it as a “freedom and liberty issue,” as one lawmaker hasput it, and moralizers see it as state-subsidized sin.

Nearly forty states have legalized some form of sports gambling, most of them having done so after 2018, when the Supreme Court struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, which had restricted sports betting to Nevada. The interest has spilled over into other forms of gambling. Casino attendance is up, and the average age of visitors has dropped from fifty to forty-two. So far, though, Texas has resisted many forms of gambling. It has long prohibited non-tribal casinos and sports betting, despite lobbying from powerful figures, including Jerry Jones, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, and Miriam Adelson, a casino magnate who also owns the Dallas Mavericks. For the past few legislative sessions, armies of lobbyists have descended on the state capitol, in Austin, trying to push for various forms of gambling.

Until recently, the lottery had been something of an afterthought. “There’s a concern in the lottery space about the aging customer base, especially as you have all these new gambling options in a lot of states,” Matt Carey, a reporter who covers the gambling industry forVIXIO, told me. In recent years, a new kind of company has been targeting a younger demographic, countering this concern. Lottery couriers, as they are known, pitch themselves as Uber or DoorDash for lottery players, providing an easy-to-use interface that allows users to buy tickets on their phones. “The couriers are trying to attract a player that isn’t, you know, my dad—somebody in their twenties or thirties who’s used to doing everything on their phone and hasn’t traditionally been a lottery player,” Carey said.

Nettles became aware of the courier companies around 2019, when she noticed that a handful of stores seemed to be selling an inordinate number of winning tickets. She went to visit one, Winner’s Corner, in a nondescript building in North Austin. Texas law mandates that lottery venders be open to the public and sell things other than lottery tickets. At Winners Corner, which is owned by a courier company called Jackpocket, a table by the register was stacked with board games. The real business took place in a back room, where dozens of lottery terminals churned out tickets for online customers and machines removed the surfaces from scratch-offs. In 2024, Winners Corner was by far the most popular lottery retailer in the state, selling a hundred and seventy-nine million dollars’ worth of lottery tickets, more than the next twenty-five retailers combined; 99.9 per cent of those sales were made to online customers,accordingto theTexasTribune. Jackpocket, which was founded in a SoHo WeWork space in 2013, has since been acquired by the sports-betting juggernaut DraftKings, for some seven hundred and fifty million dollars.

The legal status of lottery couriers is still evolving. New York and New Jersey have established processes to license them, and a handful of other states have banned them. A Texas law from the early nineties prohibits lottery sales from happening “over the phone,” to discourage underage or out-of-state buyers. A state audit later concluded that Grief “seemed quite comfortable operating in the gray areas of the State Lottery Act,” particularly when it came to courier companies. Grief maintained that his agency had no ability to regulate couriers, but his approach was hardly hands-off. “The lottery openly welcomed couriers,” said Thomas Metzger, the C.E.O. and founder of Lotto.com, a courier company, who told me that he spoke with Grief or his deputies on a weekly basis. Operating in a regulation-free environment made some courier companies uneasy. “We actually drafted and proposed regulations several times,” Metzger claimed, but, he said, the Texas Lottery didn’t take them up on the suggestions. (Grief’s attorney has said that his client “adamantly denies being part of any dishonest, fraudulent, or illegal scheme.”)

In the aftermath of the 2023 bulk buy, Texas politicians put much of the blame on the couriers. The couriers, for their part, have argued that they’re being scapegoated to deflect attention away from broader issues within the Texas Lottery Commission. In any event, the freewheeling atmosphere in Texas seems to have attracted businesses with questionable pedigrees. Lottery.com, which ended up managing the on-the-ground logistics for the 2023 lottery plan, relocated from California to Texas in 2017. One founding executive, who identified himself as a “crypto thought leader,” was involved in a plan, after Hurricane Maria, to transform Puerto Rico into a Bitcoin utopia.

Lottery.com seems to have struggled, initially. One potential investor, who visited the Lottery.com’s offices in Austin,toldBloomberg Tax, “I said, this isn’t a corporate office; this is a failed 7-Eleven with three goddamn machines.” In 2022, an investigation found that the company had sold more than half a million tickets to out-of-state players, which is illegal. Three top executives left the company. Two of them, Ryan Dickinson and Matt Clemenson, have since pleaded guilty to separate securities-fraud charges. That same year, the company stopped selling lottery tickets, its license as a lottery retailer in Texas was suspended, and its app was removed from the Apple and Google stores.

Texas Lottery executives initially portrayed the 2023 bulk buy as having caught them by surprise, but later testimony and reporting has called this into question. That April, Lottery.com’s retailer license was reinstated, and shortly thereafter the Texas Lottery Commission fielded an urgent request for dozens of ticket-printing terminals. Such a request was “very unusual,” Texas Lottery’s then deputy director, Ryan Mindell, later admitted. Metzger, of Lotto.com, got word that a bulk-buying operation was in the works—“let’s put it this way, the lottery industry is a small place,” he said—and reached out to Grief around a week before the drawing, cautioning him against providing the terminals. “Regardless of whether it was legal, I knew the optics were going to be terrible if someone outside of Texas won a local game,” he told me. But, according to a lawsuit filed by Lotto.com against the Texas Lottery Commission, Grief dismissed his concerns and “responded by saying that he thought Metzger was a ‘free market guy.’ ” IGT, the company that runs lottery operations in the state, delivered and installed the terminals to four locations; in short order, they were being used to generate millions of tickets. (Although courier companies were central to planning the bulk buy, the ticket purchases took place within the state, and not via their apps.)

It remains to be determined how much of this, if any, was illegal. In any case, the fallout has been dramatic, and much of the negative publicity has fallen on the courier companies. Grief retired abruptly last year. Mindell, his deputy, took over and promptly banned couriers. (A newly formed advocacy group, the Coalition of Texas Lottery Couriers, which includes representatives from Jackpocket, Jackpot.com, and Lotto.com, argued that the Texas Lottery Commission “ignored the warning, bent the rules, and provided the terminals necessary for an international syndicate to game the system” and “allowed lottery couriers to become the scapegoat for its own questionable activities.”) Then, this past April, Mindell resigned. TheTexasScorecard, an influential far-right news site, has been unrelenting in its criticism of pro-lottery Republicans. It seemed, briefly, that state lawmakers might vote to end the lottery entirely. At the last minute, they elected to disband it in its current form and reformulate it under a different state agency. The prospect of expanding gambling in Texas seems highly unlikely.

Nettles is still getting used to being taken seriously by powerful people. In February, at a legislative hearing about the Texas Lottery’s future, she put her name on the list to give public testimony, as she had many times before. Once her allotted three minutes were up, she grabbed her purse and began to walk away. The lawmakers called her back. “Ma’am, before you go, you’ve made some very good, specific suggestions,” one said. “Do you have some others that need to be made?”

I recently met Nettles at a Starbucks in Waco, the midway point between our homes, where she ordered her vanilla latte without a lid so that there was room for extra whipped cream on top. She had brought her laptop to update theLotto Reportwith the most recent numbers. “There are a hundred and twenty-seven drawings a week,” she grumbled. “It’s ridiculous.” When she started the publication, there were fewer than a dozen.

She seemed nostalgic for the early days. The jackpots weren’t enormous, but they were big enough to change your life. At some point, however, thelottery got addicted to growth: Powerball, Mega Millions, additional drawings, ballooning jackpots, convoluted games, fifty-dollar scratch-offs, hundred-dollar scratch-offs.

“I like to play. I like to play cards, and dominoes, and that sort of thing. It was just fun,” she said. “Before the lottery was voted in, people kept saying, ‘You don’t want that.’ ‘That’s corruption.’ ‘That’s bad.’ I didn’t listen to them, because I thought, That just can’t be. But it turns out all those people were right. We shouldn’t have it, because money is evil. I’ve always known that money is evil—it was just the fact that I like to play. I’m a player, yeah. But I don’t play like I did.” ♦

For this week’s Fault Lines column, Jon Allsop is filling in for Jay Caspian Kang.

In 2017, when the United States, Canada, and Mexico jointly applied to host the 2026 edition of the men’s soccer World Cup—the biggest sporting event on earth—their bid led with three buzzwords: “UNITY. CERTAINTY. OPPORTUNITY.” The World Cup, their official “bid book” said, is “the greatest celebration of human togetherness in sport anywhere on the planet”; the three would-be hosts were demonstrating that they were “more than neighbors”—they were “partners.” They also promised “integrity, transparency, responsibility, and full support for fair play,” and pledged to champion “respect for human rights and respect for fundamental freedoms and values.” At the time,Donald Trumphad just taken office. His Muslim travel ban was at odds with the gauzy rhetoric; he also appeared to threaten reprisals against any countries that stood in the way of the bid. In a section titled “Political Information,” the bid book acknowledged that the U.S. was “polarized” and that its image may have “suffered” overseas, but insisted that “the majority of the world” still viewed it positively. And, owing to term limits, it said, Trump could not be President in 2026.

The bid was successful—but the soccer officials behind it, as the PhiladelphiaInquirer’s Will Bunchput itrecently, had clearly never heard of Grover Cleveland. Last month, during Trump’s Memorial Day address at Arlington National Cemetery, he said that, in some ways, he’s glad that he didn’t serve his second term consecutively, from 2021 to 2025, because he wouldn’t have been in office for the World Cup, among other important events. “Now look what I have,” he said. “I have everything.” A few weeks earlier, at a public meeting of Trump’s World Cup-planning task force, Gianni Infantino, the Swiss-Italian president ofFIFA, soccer’s global governing body, said, “America will welcome the world.” Vice-PresidentJ. D. Vancepredicted that the tournament would demonstrate “the very best of the United States of America, both in athletic competition but also in hospitality.”

These sunny statements were included as clips in a promotionalvideoof the meeting that Trump posted on social media, but the video didn’t show what Vance said next: “Everybody is welcome to come and see this incredible event,” but, “when the time is up, they’ll have to go home,” otherwise they’d have to contend with Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security. Nor did the video show a later moment, when Trump warned that, if any protesters failed to behave in a “reasonable manner,” they would have to answer to Pam Bondi, the Attorney General—comments that feel even more menacing in light of Trump’smilitarized responsetoprotests this weekin Los Angeles, which is set to host the first World Cup match in the U.S. and seven other games, including a quarterfinal.

The crackdown added to a growing list of potential complications that observers foresee bedevilling the tournament, from the far-fetched, such as the idea that Trump might rename the trophy the “Roy Cohn Cup,” to the highly plausible or already pertinent: long wait times for visas, exacerbated by theDOGEcuts (so much for “CERTAINTY”); the horror stories from the border that are leading tourism to falter; Trump’swider crackdownon immigration, including, effective this week, his new, far-reaching travel ban (so much for “OPPORTUNITY”); and tariff-induced price uncertainty that has contributed to deeply troubled relations between the U.S. and its co-hosts (so much for “UNITY”). During the planning meeting, Infantino seemed to speak the words “Canada” and “Mexico” as if they were an afterthought; Trump noticed and said, “That’s the way it’s supposed to be.” Human-rights groups have expressed fears about the treatment of the L.G.B.T.Q. community and the press; there have been calls for a boycott. Already, the tournament has acquired various unflattering monikers: the “Trade War World Cup”; the “ ‘America First’ World Cup”; the “MAGAWorld Cup”; the “Donald Trump World Cup.”

The tournament could easily become a disaster. But it also seems plausible that Trump will blitz through all the concerns, or at least find ways to sweep them under the rug. (Many autocratic regimes have used sporting events to perform functionality to the world.) Either way, soccer is about to become a much bigger news story in the U.S. The one-year countdown started this week, and a U.S.-hosted “World Cup” for club sides—a trial run, of sorts, for the main event—kicks off tomorrow, amid reports of confusion about the travel rights of visitors, and of undocumented U.S.-based fans opting to stay away from matches for fear of making themselves a target of immigration enforcement. Whatever happens next, the World Cup is a fitting lens through which to understand Trump’s approach to the world, as a second-term Trump doctrine takes shape. And, if the country he runs has strayed from the idealistic language of the bid book on paper, that may make itmoresimilar to other modern-day World Cup hosts, rather than less.

In March, during a different meeting with Infantino at the White House, Trump suggested that the U.S. had never hosted the World Cup before. But it has, back in 1994. I don’t remember the tournament—I was a year old at the time—but, as best as I can tell, the main source of controversy beforehand was soccer’s lack of popularity in the U.S. The event itself was perhaps most memorable for Diana Ross fluffing a noveltypenalty kickduring the opening ceremony—though that was overshadowed by the O. J. Simpson Bronco chase, which took place later on the same day—and the fading Argentinean superstar Diego Maradona being sent home after failing a drug test. By far its darkest moment occurred not on U.S. soil but in Colombia, where Andrés Escobar was murdered after returning home from scoring an own goal that helped eliminate his country.

In the buildup to the next World Cup, Trump’s immigration policies have sometimes clashed very directly with the world of soccer. After the Administration deportedhundreds of Venezuelansto a brutal mega-prison in El Salvador, it emerged that one of them, Jerce Reyes Barrios, had been a professional goalkeeper before moving to the U.S.; a tattoo that officials apparently interpreted as evidence of his membership in a brutal gang was actually a motif representing the top Spanish soccer team Real Madrid. In April, women’s players from Venezuela and Zambia who play for club sides in the U.S. did not leave the country to represent their national teams, amid uncertainty about whether they would be able to get back in. Then, last week, in an executive order, Trump announced full or partial travel restrictions on citizens of nineteen countries, several of which could feasibly qualify for the 2026 World Cup. (Iran has qualified already.) The measure contained an explicit exemption for players, staff, and “immediate relatives” of World Cup teams. But there didn’t appear to be any such exceptions for supporters. Whatever the specifics, the order plainly conflicted with the promise of an open, welcoming tournament. Its representation of Trump’s America First priorities brought to my mind a question that Aaron Timmsposedin theGuardianearlier this year, when he asked whether soccer can “continue to be a globalizing force in a deglobalizing world.”

Aggressive nativism is a core plank of Trump’s world view, but his approach to foreign affairs is more complicated than this alone. Although his instincts might be more isolationist than those of his recent predecessors, he nonetheless seems to see himself as the main character of the world, standing astride a competition of nations that runs mostly on the basis of self-interest, but that also, because this is Trump, has a reality-TV sheen to it, with winnersgetting his favorand losers getting performativelythrashedin front of the cameras. The World Cup shines a light on this dynamic, too, and might even be a useful metaphor for it. Asked, in March, how U.S. tensions with Canada and Mexico might affect the tournament, Trump suggested that they would make it “more exciting,” adding, “Tension’s a good thing”; in May, upon learning that Russia is prohibited from taking part, Trump said that reversing the ban could be a “good incentive” to encourage the country to make peace with Ukraine. And, whereas no one remembers the 1994 World Cup for Bill Clinton, Trump is already claiming ownership of the 2026 edition; Leander Schaerlaeckens,writingin theGuardian, went so far as to predict that it would be “leveraged for the glorification of a leader to a degree not seen since Benito Mussolini dominated the 1934 World Cup in Italy.”

Trump’s foreign policy is guided not only by his exaltation but by financial interests. During his first foreign trip since returning to office, to the Gulf, he announced astronomical investment deals and was dogged by the news that he’d agreed to accept a luxury plane from Qatar, which even some of his diehard supporters seemed to see as a brazenly corrupt act. Among those who joined the trip was Infantino, who, beyond direct World Cup-related business, has reportedly struck up a warm friendship with Trump. (He also attended the Inauguration in January.) Infantino was late to aFIFAcongress in Paraguay because he attended the Gulf junket, leading European soccer officials to accuse him of prioritizing his “private political interests,” but there were some soccer-related matters to attend to, including a ceremony to transfer the World Cup to the U.S. from Qatar, the previous host. Indeed, if the U.S. has pivoted toward the Gulf under Trump,FIFAhas done something strikingly similar; Qatar was awarded the tournament in 2022, and Saudi Arabia will host it in 2034, the logical culmination of the country’s aggressive push to conquer the globalsportingscene. It’s a far cry from the nineties, when the countries to host the World Cup, apart from the U.S., were Italy and France. There’s a metaphor in that, too.

In recent weeks, various foreign-policy commentators have tried to articulate a Trump doctrine. I think that it’s still hazy—and that Trump might not be coherent enough to deserve such schematic treatment—but something he said in Saudi Arabia last month might be the best distillation so far. “In recent years, far too many American Presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it’s our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use U.S. policy to dispense justice for their sins,” he said. “I believe it is God’s job to sit in judgment. My job [is] to defend America and to promote the fundamental interests of stability, prosperity, and peace.” Much has changed since the early days of Trump’s first term, but buzzwords still come in threes.

On Trump’s first foreign trip to the Gulf, in 2017, he spoke in similar terms. Back then,FIFA, for all its talk of core values, was already facing loud criticism for awarding the rights to host the World Cup to Qatar, which has persecuted dissidents and L.G.B.T.Q. people, and where migrant laborers died in the process of getting the venues ready. In 2022, whenthat tournamentfinally rolled around, Infantino lashed out at the critics, in remarks that are best remembered for baffling gestures of solidarity—“Today I feel gay. Today I feel disabled. Today I feel a migrant worker.”—that were quickly mocked and memed. But something Infantino said after was perhaps more telling: “For what we Europeans have been doing in the last three thousand years around the world, we should be apologizing for thenextthree thousand years before starting to give moral lessons to people.” Call it the Infantino doctrine. ♦

For this week’s Fault Lines column, Jon Allsop is filling in for Jay Caspian Kang.

Earlier this year, Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, launched a podcast that promised direct conversations with people he disagrees with. In reality, it featured him sucking up to figures from theMAGAExtended Universe. Inthe début episode,the guest was Charlie Kirk, an influential young right-wing activist and commentator; Newsom suggested that his thirteen-year-old son was so excited to meet Kirk that he wanted to skip school to attend the taping. (Newsom didn’t let him. “C’mon,” Kirk objected. “You cancelled school for like two years!” Newsom seemed to find this funny.) The following week, Steve Bannon came on the show and said that the 2020 election was stolen; Newsom let this slide. Recently, in the wake of the protests against immigration raids in Los Angeles, Kirk and Bannon have returned Newsom’s hospitality by, respectively, calling him “the fakest person I’ve ever met” and comparing him to John C. Calhoun. Newsom, for his part, has pushed back strongly against the Trump Administration’s militarized response to the protests, challenging Tom Homan, President Trump’s border czar, to arrest him (“Come and get me, tough guy”) and tweaking Trump himself in TikTok memes inspired by “Hamilton” andTaylor Swift. With enemies like these, who needs friends?

Jay Caspian Kang pointed outin this column, in March, that Newsom’s podcast always seemed doomed to fail—not to mention “embarrassing”—because his conciliatory approach was out of step with polling that indicated liberals want to see Democrats fight Trump’s Republican Party, not get along with it. Ina different column, Kang similarly took issue with a school of thought, advanced most explicitly by the veteran strategist James Carville, holding that Democrats should “roll over and play dead,” allowing Trump to burn himself out. As Kang put it, this strategy never seemed viable, either, and several recent developments signal that playing dead is, well, dead. Newsom’s newfound combativeness is one example. Another came last week, also in relation to the L.A. protests, when Alex Padilla, the normally mild-mannered California senator, confronted Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security Secretary, at a press conference, and was forced to the floor and handcuffed by federal agents. This week, there were similar scenes in New York City, where agents arrested Brad Lander, the comptroller and a candidate for mayor, while he was accompanying a migrant in immigration court. In between, millions of anti-Trump demonstrators protested across the country under the banner “No Kings.”

It’s possible to see all this as the dormant resistance to Trump finally awakening. But that isn’t really correct. AsI wrote in the first days of the new Administration, Trump’s opponents may not have marshalled anything like the enormous Women’s March of January, 2017, but civil-society groups had started to organize their supporters, and many of Trump’s early moves were quickly challenged in court. Since then, therehavebeen a lot of protests—even more, by one count, than in the equivalent stretch of Trump’s first term—though the media, as Kang noted, hasn’t always covered them to the same extent. Newsom may only just have found his voice, but other leading Democrats—the Illinois governor,J. B. Pritzker, for example—never lost theirs. Earlier this year, I felt sure that this sort of activity would spread and intensify, as it now has, if only because Trump’s political project ultimatelyrequiresresistance—which generates conflict—in order to thrive, and he will keep pushing until inevitably provoking his opponents. Newsom is a case in point. His grovelling may have been of some use to the likes of Kirk and Bannon, but he’s much more useful as a foil, an avatar of a woke élite that’s imperilling America. Being a foil may be useful to Newsom, too. One ally told NBC that if Newsomwereto be arrested for supposedly obstructing Trump’s immigration raids, it would be his “Nelson Mandela moment”—a comparison that has surely not been made before, and hopefully won’t be again.

We are, unfortunately, at the point in this column where I must capitalize the word “Resistance,” and maybe add a hashtag for good measure. As I’ve previouslynoted, with these accoutrements, the word comes to signify something more than merely fighting back, becoming freighted with the cultural signifiers of the liberal opposition to Trump’s first term. (Think “Notorious R.B.G.” tote bags, Jimmy Kimmel proposing that Trump become a ceremonial king in exchange for going away as President, the cast of “Hamilton” confronting then Vice-President Mike Pence.) As Trump returned to office, this #Resistancedidappear to be dead. Now Newsom is posting “Hamilton” memes, and Jimmy Kimmel has shown up at a “No Kings” protest. I do still think we’re in a different moment. (The old Twitter is gone, for starters.) But the basic animating spirit of the #Resistance has clearly survived.

Still, it remains an open question what a new Resistance might look like, how it might cohere or be channelled. In February, Kang posed precisely that question in this column. He toyed with historical precedents—Goldwater Republicanism, the Tea Party—but found them imprecise and largely unhelpful. He described the contours of a “nü-Resistance”—which he characterized as “angry, oppositional, and ideologically chaotic,” and severed from various pillars of the Democratic establishment—but wasn’t yet sure where that energy might go.

Nearly half a year later, we have some new data points. The framework of a Democratic Tea Party remains unhelpful—butsomethingis going on inside (and, now, outside) the Democratic National Committee, which has recently been riven by threats to primary complacent incumbents (and, now, Democrats who support going to war with Iran). These tensions have been whipped up, most notably, by David Hogg, the Parkland shooting survivor turned activist turned short-serving D.N.C. vice-chair. (After other D.N.C. leaders clashed with Hogg, his election was invalidated on procedural grounds, and he ultimately declined to run again for the post.) And Newsom, Padilla, and the “No Kings” protests appear to have harnessed some of the loose energy recently.

But other reported efforts to counter Trump’s appeal—throwing money at influencers in the hope of finding the “next Joe Rogan,” a project to study “the syntax, language and content” that appeal to young men—demonstrate the limits of top-down attempts to cultivate political energy, as well as the persistent staleness of the institutional Democratic brand. At this stage, it seems to me that “young men,” never as homogeneous a voting bloc as imagined by post-election pundits, are vastly more likely to get bored ofMAGAthan to be seduced by the political equivalent of Steve Buscemi with a skateboard asking them, “How do you vote, fellow-kids?” More substantively, the ideological contours of the new Resistance still feel unsettled. Uncompromising opposition to Trump’s most brazen maneuversdoesincreasingly look like a unifying approach. But, even there, consensus is not yet total. Some Democrats have fretted that Trump’s L.A. crackdown is bait to distract them from kitchen-table issues. Gretchen Whitmer—the governor of Michigan and, like Newsom, a leading candidate to be the Democrats’ next standard-bearer—has pursued a strategy of working with the Administration. If Newsom’s podcast supplied the most humiliating audio of the new Trump era, the most humiliating image was surelya photo of Whitmerphysically hiding in the Oval Office as Trump signed orders to investigate a pair of first-term officials who went on to criticize him. This hasn’t seemed to hurt her standing—at least in Michigan—and she has been able to tout some policy victories, most notably obtaining new fighter jets for a local base.

As with Newsom, I suspect that Trump will at some point drive Whitmer past breaking point. (Already, he has suggested that he might pardon the men convicted of trying to kidnap her, in 2020; what happens if he attempts to send the Marines to Detroit?) Then again, the notion that Newsom started his podcast with the pure intention of reaching out toMAGA, only to be met with actions that he couldn’t possibly accept, may underplay his political cunning. It’s not hard to imagine Newsom embarking on the podcast—which, as Kang noted, immediately went down horribly with the Democratic base—knowing full well that he would soon be back in Resistance-leader mode, but seeing it, in the interim, as a useful way to distance himself from progressive totems that he perceives as toxic (for instance, trans athletes competing in girls’ sports, which he disavowed to Kirk), or something to point to and say, “Look, I really did try reasoning with these people!”

And this is assuming that Newsom actuallyhaspivoted away from the podcast-conciliation strategy, which isn’t clear, even if he certainly has movedtowardResistance leadership. As recently as June 4th, he posted another cloyingly folksy conversation, this time with Dr. Phil, who described himself as “the least political person I know” before extolling family values and weighing in on “pro-Hamas” protests on college campuses; two days later, the L.A. raids began. (Dr. Phil was on the scene, having been granted special access, for some reason, to document immigration-enforcement actions.) Last week,Newsomwas interviewed on “The Daily,” the New YorkTimes’ flagship podcast, and without any prompting stressed that he has “no problem meeting with people and talking to people I disagree with,” as “some of your viewers and listeners may know.” Asked about his podcast, he indicated that he still sees it as “incredibly important” to show “a little humility” toward his adversaries, and to listen.

Back in February, Kang concluded that, when it came to the emerging opposition to Trump, “what we are seeing is not a shift in policy preferences but, rather, the dissolution of traditional political logic in this country.” I’m not sure I’d go quite this far. It’s perfectly logical, in light of how Trump is behaving, that the opposition is intensifying; it is also not surprising—or necessarily concerning—that Democrats haven’t yet articulated a coherent new policy platform less than a year on from a priors-shattering defeat. But Newsom and many of his fellow-Democrats do seem to be trying to have it both ways—to prove that you can joke around with Steve Bannonandpost “Hamilton” memes about Trump without disappearing down the gaping chasm between those acts. WhenI last wrote about Trump resistance in this column, it was to argue that it will have to coalesce, if it does at all, within a fragmented media ecosystem; Newsom, perhaps, is trying to game the choose-your-own-adventure quality of this ecosystem by putting out different content that might seep into, and resonate within, very different filter bubbles. I think this is doomed to fail because it (and he) is palpably inauthentic, and authenticity—or, rather, the perception thereof—is king in this media environment. But someone else might manage to do it. If the new Resistance remains hard to define, that’s partly because it’s still early. There’s no inevitability of neat coherence down the line. One thing is for sure: the mass protests will continue. ♦

Early on Friday, Israel launched a major attack on Iranian nuclear sites and weapons facilities, and targeted many of its top military officials. In retaliation, Iran launched dozens of ballistic missiles at Tel Aviv and Jerusalem late Friday. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, said that the strikes would “continue for as many days as it takes to remove this threat.” In response, President Trump, who had recently said that he wanted to renegotiate a nuclear deal with Iran—during his first term, he pulled out of the original nuclear deal signed during the Obama Administration —expressed strong support for the Israeli attack, saying, “I think it’s been excellent. We gave [the Iranians] a chance and they didn’t take it. They got hit hard, very hard. . . . And there’s more to come.”

On Friday, I spoke by phone with Aluf Benn, the editor-in-chief ofHaaretz. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed Netanyahu’s motives for ordering a strike, how the Prime Minister uses his understanding of Trump to pursue his own agenda, and what this attack means for the future of the region.

Why do you think this is happening right now, in June of 2025, rather than earlier or in the future?

First of all, Israel has been at war with the Iranian “axis of resistance” for almost two years now. Second, Israel, for more than twenty years, has been designing and preparing a plan to attack Iran under successive leaders. For most of that time, it was Netanyahu in charge, but military leaders have long been thinking of dismantling Iran’s nuclear facilities in the same way that Israel bombed a nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981 and then in Syria in 2007. In both cases, those nuclear programs were seen as existential threats to Israel, and the goal was to preëmpt, delay, or destroy the main nuclear facilities.

So the idea of bombing Iran has been around for two decades. It peaked around 2012, under Netanyahu and then Defense Minister Ehud Barak, but they were stopped by the Obama Administration, which eventually signed a deal with Iran to limit its nuclear program. At that point, some of the Israeli security and intelligence chiefs were thinking that Israel should not go it alone and never attack Iran without American consent and prior knowledge. In 1981, Menachem Begin, the Prime Minister, bombed the nuclear reactor near Baghdad without telling the Americans. And that created tension between the two governments for a while. But, in 2007, Ehud Olmert told George W. Bush about a reactor that was being built in the Syrian desert at the time. It was a secret facility. We shared the intelligence with Bush, and Bush was thinking for a while of attacking with American forces. But then the Americans decided not to, and they just let Israel destroy the facility. Israel did not take responsibility for the strike for almost a decade in order not to embarrass Bashar al-Assad and force him into retaliation.

Discretion is not the case today. This attack is very visible and follows two exchanges of fire between Iran and Israel last year, in which Iran retaliated in April for the assassination of one of its generals in Damascus. They fired all kinds of drones in response. But their attack failed because Israel was protected by a coalition that includedCENTCOM[the U.S. Central Command]. And then in October, once again, there were missile attacks by Iran and an Israeli attack that was successful in dismantling Iranian air defenses. This was followed by the collapse of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Assad regime in Syria, the two main allies of Iran in our vicinity. And that paved the way and opened the corridor for an eventual attack on the nuclear facilities. But they waited for Trump to give the green light.

There had been concern among some more hawkish Israelis that Trump would not give a green light to this strike, because he wanted a deal with Iran. But what you seem to be saying is that one crucial thing that’s changed is, in fact, the timing and Trump being in office.

First of all, the operational opportunity to have an open corridor because of the suppression of Iranian air defenses in October mattered, and the Russians did not replenish Iranian stockpiles and systems afterward. And then there was the subsequent defeat of Hezbollah by the I.D.F., the decapitation of its leadership, the destruction of most of its strong ballistic-missile force, and then Assad falling. So now you can deploy a very large force to destroy targets within Iran. And it was reported recently that Israel had finished its preparations and Netanyahu was pushing for an attack on Iran. There were some different signs, like public opposition by Trump, even as recently as this week, but clearly Netanyahu told him about it in advance.

And today Trump has been very supportive.

Underneath that Presidential support, we have one thing that is crucial, and that was one of the last decisions of Trump’s first term, which was to include Israel inCENTCOM. That enabled Israel to be part of the U.S. regional air-defense and missile-defense system. So Israel is now relying not on American bombers and American soldiers on the ground but you have coördination, coöperation, intelligence sharing, et cetera.

It seems that Netanyahu has a pretty good understanding of Trump in terms of both Iran and Gaza. Trump will say he wants to make a deal with Iran. He’ll say he wants a ceasefire in Gaza, but whether it’s his attention span or his lack of actually caring about it, he is not really going to put pressure on Israel to keep it from doing what it wants to do.

In Gaza, there’s been a lot of criticism of what Israel has done. But over all, historically, America has given Israel quite a free hand vis-à-vis the Palestinians. It was always different on regional matters, where America always had the final word, even when it followed what Israel wanted. Like Trump’s decision to leave the nuclear deal in 2018—it always had the final word. And, in this case, too, Trump wanted a deal. If the Iranians had agreed to the American terms to stop uranium enrichment, they could have had a deal. Trump gave them time, and then they didn’t respond, so Israel attacked. In a similar way, Israel begged for a ceasefire with Hezbollah in the north and the now deceased leader of Hezbollah at the time was saying, “No, we are going to support our brothers in Gaza, and we’re going to keep firing at Israel and keep that second front open.” They could have been saved.

You could say that Israel could have stopped the war in Gaza, and that could have helped things regionally, too.

Definitely. But Netanyahu is still committed to the final occupation of Gaza and destruction of the Palestinians . . . of Hamas, and to eventually drive out the Palestinians from there, and follow what he calls the Trump plan: just giving the land to resorts and to Israeli settlements. This is still the official Israeli policy in Gaza.

Would Israel now suffice with the attack on Iran to let go of Gaza or, on the contrary, use the defeat of the axis of resistance to conclude the occupation of Gaza and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians? That remains to be seen.

Reading your newspaper, it’s very clear to me that many people believe that Netanyahu is extending the war in Gaza for his own political reasons and that you can’t separate the war from Netanyahu’s personal desires. Is that the case here?

Well, first of all, with attacking Iran, there’s very strong support within Israel, at least within the Jewish society—I would say a virtual consensus. We wrote an editorial saying, “Don’t go to war,” but it’s a minority position, and it’s going to be an even smaller minority if Israel succeeds in wiping out the Iranian nuclear program and forcing Iran to capitulate in some way, or if there is an Iranian regime change. But, besides that, one of Netanyahu’s abilities throughout the war, even when he and his leadership are unpopular and still lagging behind in public-opinion surveys, has been to pursue popular policies. The policy of destruction and even partial occupation of Gaza has been very popular, to punish Hamas for what it did on October 7th. The policy of attacking Iran is extremely popular, and there’s no real opposition to that in Israel. The opposition was only the fear of alienating the United States, or the fear that such an operation is too risky to be successful.

What did your editorial say? Why did you counsel against this?

Because we thought, and we still think, that eventually the surest way to prevent Iran from going nuclear was a deal, in the same way that the Obama deal, for the three years that it was in place, was quite successful in slowing it down.

So what are Netanyahu’s coalitional politics in terms of this?

Look, Netanyahu has had a shtick for many, many years that, whenever he does anything that is less popular with parts of his base, he would always pretend to surrender to some stronger force. So, when he does unpopular stuff like extending the Gaza war, not freeing the hostages with the deal, he can imply to the public that he can’t do that because he is afraid of the far right bringing down his coalition. Meanwhile, if and when he did agree to a deal with Hamas, and if and when he eventually agreed to a ceasefire in Gaza without driving out the Palestinians and without allowing the land for Israeli settlements, he would say, “I had to surrender to Trump. We needed Trump on Iran. We need Trump’s diplomatic cover, whatever. So I have to surrender to Trump.” And now, after the attack on Iran, the far right won’t want to leave the coalition because there will be others who could possibly join the coalition. That gives Netanyahu a much wider room to maneuver politically. On the night before the attack, the coalition was under threat, not of collapsing but of beginning to go downhill, because of the rebellion of some of the ultra-Orthodox partners who opposed the drafting of their kids into the Army. Currently, they have an exemption. So Netanyahu played it masterfully. He was able to prevent any damage and to keep his coalition together.

You talked about popular opinion in Israel being very much united behind this. Is that true at the élite level of security chiefs and former security chiefs, many of whom have had criticisms of Netanyahu and even his defense policies?

Well, their criticisms were twofold. One was about the need to coördinate with the United States, and I think he did that. The other would be if the attack failed, and that still remains to be seen. It’s not over yet. If Israel is destroyed by Iranian missiles, it’s going to be a difficult sell. But I think more to the point is that there are a bunch of security, former security chiefs, andHaaretzcommentators and others who don’t trust his decisions, because of his involvement in political scandals and corruption and, moreover, his authoritarian aspirations, as embedded in his judicial overhaul and the effort to weaken checks and balances on his rule. These things raise suspicions about his motives. But clearly this is not something that Netanyahu or any other leader could do alone. You have a very sophisticated war machine and intelligence machine at play here. It’s not just about the far right fighting the Iranians.

What do you mean by a sophisticated war machine?

The active security chiefs were definitely in on this, and their predecessors as well. It’s something that has been in preparation for years. Many of these critics were deeply involved in whatever we see today in Tehran.

So we’ve talked for a while now, and one thing you haven’t said is that the reason for this attack is that the situation with Iran and nuclear weapons has changed, and that the danger is much greater now. Has it?

This is very important, and I forgot to mention it. On December 5th, six months ago, Iran started doubling down by fuelling its uranium-enrichment facilities so that the product would be one step below the nuclear-weapons threshold. This was reported by the International Atomic Energy Agency. So they edged much closer to the bomb. And, if you look at the timetable—I’m not familiar with the Iranian decision-making process, obviously—but, if you look at the timetable, they did this during the American transition period, which is always a good time to do stuff, when the outgoing Administration is not looking closely and the new one is not in power yet. So they thought that they would enter the negotiations with the United States from a stronger position and maybe show that they are a few weeks away from enriched uranium for nuclear weapons.

That’s clearly part of the Israeli timetable, as well. We have a combination here of Iranian recklessness and a bold decision to go full speed or almost full speed ahead with uranium enrichment. You have the operational opportunity because of the October attack last year. And you had Trump, who was willing, for the first time in twenty years and after several American Presidents, to listen to the Israeli plan and give it some sort of green light and coördinate and then applaud it afterward, rather than saying, “We had no idea. We were not there. We just watched it on television.”♦