06/18 Links Pt2: The ‘America First’ Crew’s Complete Disregard for American Lives; Zohran Mamdani justifies “globalize the intifada” by saying the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was an intifada.

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The ‘America First’ Crew’s Complete Disregard for American Lives

As an American, I have a hard time shrugging this off. As an American, I find it increasingly difficult to even understand the psychology of those who can shrug it off. And as an American, I find it incomprehensible that the defenders of these innocent American victims are accused of being disloyal Americans.

“They were schoolyard bullies,” Trump said of Iran this morning. “But now they’re not bullies anymore.” He specifically mentioned the Iranians’ motto of “Death to America,” which was also their battle plan and organizing program. He seemed pleased that there were finally consequences for Iran’s long war on the United States, that there is a price to be paid for all Iran’s mischief.

And here is the most interesting part: The price Iran has paid has not, in fact, been steep or cruel and unusual. In the history of mankind, no nation’s civilians have been safer while an enemy state controls their airspace during a live war. There’s nothing really to even compare it to. We are watching something no one has ever watched before. Israel, in response to Iran’s pursuit of the destruction of the Jewish people, not to mention its role in the worst daylong mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust, took control of Iran’s airspace and used that to patiently eliminate the sources of the Iranian regime’s power to oppress its people.

Trump supports this. If it feels to the keyboard warriors of isolationism like there is a degree of pressure to support these strikes, that is because those who are comfortable with Iranian nuclear acquisition, which would grant the regime full immunity from all its ongoing crimes against America and Americans, are in the minority.

It is also because they must intuitively question, on some level, their own decision to draw the line in the sand right here. When Trump ordered the elimination of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Syria in 2019, the handwringing from his MAGA supporters was muted. The same is true for the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian terror general in charge of a global campaign to murder Americans. It was not cause for much in the way of hysterical warnings of apocalyptic warmongering.

The difference this time, of course, is Israel’s direct involvement. Most Americans seem to think this is a good thing—we have an allied nation willing to sacrifice to keep our common enemies down—but a few are uncomfortable for reasons they do not try very hard to disguise.

Whatever “America First” means, surely it ought not to mean a coldblooded heartlessness toward the victims of totalitarian terror, many of whom are Americans themselves. Nor should it mean an instinctive suspicion of anyone who seeks the defeat of America’s enemies.

John Ondrasik: My 2001 Hit Song, ‘Superman,’ Is for the Hostages in Gaza

I turned to “Superman,” hoping to remind the world that the hostages are people, not statistics. They are brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, husbands and wives. Music would bring out this shared humanity after the Jewish people experienced their worst trauma since the Holocaust, just like music uplifted an America shattered by 9/11.

“Superman” is a message of hope, solidarity and unity. Yet the unity of 2001 feels elusive. In response to my compassion for the hostages, I’ve been called a sellout and propagandist. For whom or what, I don’t know. I’ve been told I should “stick to music.” My new video with Alon’s family—shared by hostage families, supported by human-rights advocates, played in synagogues and town halls—triggered an onslaught of online vitriol.

“Superman” isn’t political. It’s emotional. It’s all of us. I can’t understand how connecting it to the obvious cause of Israeli hostages unleashed a torrent of hate from people who have never listened to the lyrics, never watched the video, and never cared to understand what this moment is truly about. To them, taking a stand—any stand—means choosing sides in someone else’s war. Yet the hostages aren’t political. This is a basic moral issue.

I’ve written political music before. When I released “Blood on My Hands” in 2021, condemning the botched U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, I expected blowback. I got it. But I accepted that because the song was overtly political. It pointed fingers, demanded accountability. It became the voice for veterans of the war in Afghanistan who were gutted by the withdrawal. Similarly, I wrote “Can One Man Save the World” to support Ukraine, and then recorded a video for it with a Ukrainian orchestra in the bombed-out Antonov airport. I chose a side, and again expected the criticism I received.

Yet there is no way to pick a side over Oct. 7. The horrors of that day stand alone. My critics believe that expressing empathy for one group means you must hate another. You have to either be “oppressor” or “oppressed,” though I’m not sure who Alon Ohel is oppressing from the tunnels of Gaza. In the face of these absurd labels, there’s no room for conversation, let alone reality.

When did we lose the ability to say “I see suffering, and I choose to respond with compassion”? How can anyone be reluctant to say a simple phrase like “Free the Hostages”? Would anyone prefer they stay put, starving and abused underground? When did we become so tribal that Americans could label a song dangerous, divisive or, worse, genocidal, simply because it refuses to dehumanize one side over the other?

Music is where we should be able to meet honestly without enmity. As I sing in “Superman,” I’m not naive. I know a song can’t stop a war, but it can start a conversation. It can open a heart. It can remind us that behind every headline is a human being who bleeds and loves and cries just like we do.

Rigged, Corrupt, and False: The UN Just Accused Israel of “Extermination"

The UN’s latest accusation of “extermination” against Israel is not just false—it’s the culmination of a rigged, corrupt process designed to shield terrorists and slander the Jewish state.

International law was created to protect humanity from horrors like genocide, mass murder, and systemic oppression. But what happens when those very laws are hijacked—used not to protect the innocent, but to cover for terrorists and smear their victims?

Welcome to the world of the UN Human Rights Council’s Commission of Inquiry on Israel, chaired by Navi Pillay. The COI’s latest June 2025 report accuses Israel of the crime of extermination—a grotesque inversion of reality that exposes the entire commission for what it is: propaganda in legal drag. The UN’s Permanent Inquisition

Unlike past UN inquiries that had defined time frames, this Commission of Inquiry is permanent. Established after the 2021 Hamas-Israel war, it was designed to create an endless cycle of condemnation against Israel, regardless of facts. The COI doesn’t just investigate events—it investigates Israel’s existence.

Its leadership? Activists pretending to be in judges’ robes.
Navi Pillay has long lobbied for sanctions against Israel and supports the antisemitic BDS movement.
Miloon Kothari publicly ranted about “the Jewish lobby,” comments so outrageous even the U.S. condemned them as “antisemitic, inappropriate, and corrosive.”
Chris Sidoti mocked accusations of antisemitism, claiming that “Jews throw around accusations of antisemitism like rice at a wedding.”

This is not impartiality. This is a rigged trial. The methodology behind the COI's latest report has raised significant concerns, particularly regarding its lack of transparency. The report relies heavily on anonymous testimony and unverifiable sources, with little to no forensic evidence to back up its claims.

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06/18 Links Pt1: This Is Israel’s ‘Finest Hour’ — And Iran’s Turning Point; Israel Hits Iranian Weapons Depots, Internal Security HQ As Trump Weighs US Involvement

From Ian:

Roz Rothstein: Iran’s Nuclear Escalation Is Not Just Israel’s Problem — It’s the World’s

Many talking heads who disagree with Israel’s preemptive attack on Iran are asking, “What is Israel’s endgame?” The answer should be obvious. Israel’s end goal is to prevent an existential threat from, and denuclearize, a theocratic government that has openly called for the destruction of not just one nation, but an entire people. Iran left Israel no choice. The alternative would have been to wait for a nuclear-armed dictatorship to make good on its promises of annihilation.

It is important to remember that this is not Israel’s first confrontation with existential threats. From its founding, Israel has been forced to defend itself against those who sought its destruction. But what we are seeing now is different. This is not another border conflict or skirmish with a non-state terrorist actor funded by Iran. This is a direct confrontation with Iran, a regime that has both the ideology and, increasingly, the capacity to inflict catastrophic damage, not only on Israel but on the broader international community.

What would the world expect Israel to do in this moment? Sit silently while its enemies prepare weapons of mass murder? Wait until the regime that funds more terror proxies than any other country in the world gains the ability to launch nuclear warheads? Every sovereign nation has the right — and the duty — to defend its people. When that nation is the first target of a radical regime’s nuclear ambitions, that duty becomes urgent and non-negotiable.

Now is the time for moral clarity and international resolve. A maniacal regime with nuclear ambitions that openly threatens to destroy Israel, the U.S., and the West, cannot be appeased or ignored. This is not just an Israeli problem. It is a test of the world’s ability to recognize evil, call it by its name, and confront it before it is too late.

Israel is on the front lines, but the danger reaches far beyond its borders. What Iran is attempting is not just a regional conflict — it is a challenge to the global order. If the world fails to stop Iran now, the consequences will be felt from Jerusalem to London to New York and beyond. The safety of our shared future depends on our ability to see the threat that is staring us in the face, and to act — not with delay, not with equivocation, but with unity, courage and resolve.

By defanging Iran, Trump would also bloody China and Russia

Clearly, it is in America’s best interest to give Israel what it needs to succeed, and to pursue a strategy that exploits Iran’s multiple internal and external pressure points to further weaken the regime’s hand.

This is important not just for containing Iran, but because of the message it will send Iran’s autocratic allies, Russia and China, about America’s commitment to restoring deterrence.

Make no mistake: Russia and China are also — at least metaphorically — being bloodied by Israel’s success.

The collapse of the Assad regime in Syria last year already dealt a blow to this alliance’s strategic depth in the region; the prospect of a weakened or collapsed Iran puts put an even larger dent in the armor of this dangerous partnership.

More importantly, by demonstrating American resolve on the issue of nuclear proliferation, dictators like Xi Jinping will have to think twice before making any aggressive or destabilizing moves — for example, in the South China Sea, or toward Taiwan.

To critics who argue that America is on the verge of being dragged into yet another Middle Eastern entanglement, it’s worth remembering that wars generally start when bad actors perceive weakness — not the other way around.

Brendan O'Neill: Israel’s clash with Iran is nothing like the Iraq War

For the Iraq comparison to carry moral weight, Saddam would have had to have attacked the US and the UK – and savagely. In Britain, which has a population of 70million to Israel’s nearly 10million, he would have had to have funded a terror army that slaughtered 8,400 of our people. And sponsored fanatical militants who fired 35,000 rockets at our cities, causing nearly half a million Brits to be displaced. And fired 2,500 of his own missiles directly at our cities. I was implacably opposed to the Iraq War, but if Saddam had visited such horrors on my countrymen I would have supported action against him. I’m an anti-imperialist, not a hippy.

Regionally, too, the Iraq comparison speaks to the ahistoricism of Israel’s critics. The worst thing about the Iraq War is that it was a violent pummelling of a destitute nation. War with Iran, war with Kuwait, war with its own freedom-yearning Kurdish population, war with America, the UN-enforced partition of its lands, the UN’s sanctions that caused chronic hunger and disease – Iraq was a feeble, pathetic half-nation in 2003. ‘Our’ war against it was pure moral pantomime, with well-known deadly consequences.

Iran, by contrast, is an energetic actor in the Middle East. It does pose a strategic threat. It deploys its proxies to the imperial end of extending its theocratic writ across the region. It has fought brutal proxy wars with Saudi Arabia, most notably in Yemen. And it unquestionably menaces Israel. Its missiles and its proxies’ pogroms are testament to that. Iran’s dream – openly – is to eradicate the Jewish State. Which other nation on Earth would be told to chill out in the face of such an extremist neighbour which in both word and deed had made plain its annihilationist aspirations?

The ‘invoking of the spectre of Iraq’ deserves ridicule. If people want to campaign against US or UK assistance for Israel’s war with Iran, that’s their business. I don’t want to see Western boots on the ground in Iran – let the IDF and the mullahs fight this war that Iran started. But the frothing anger with Israel for waging a supposed ‘forever war’, the feverish depiction of Israel’s leaders as modern-day Bushes or Blairs promising the world nothing but catastrophe, smacks of political infantilism. An addiction to the easy anti-war positions of the 2000s has blinded people to the moral and even civilisational questions raised by the multi-pronged Islamist effort to destroy the Jewish State.

Israel’s critics see themselves as being on the side of peace. Really? In railing against Israel for striking back against the regime that has visited extreme violence on its people, they are essentially instructing the Jewish State to live meekly alongside an existential hazard. They want to maintain a status quo ante in which the permanent threat of annihilation hangs over Israel. They see the existential endangerment of the Jews of Israel as a small price to pay for their own peace of mind. That isn’t ‘peace’ – it’s the displacement of war on to the Jews in order to save non-Jews’ arses.

It’s understandable that Iraq gave rise to a new isolationism. But it’s clear now that concern about that war has curdled into a deep and fretful cynicism where military action of any kind is viewed suspiciously. The role of the ‘Iraq spectre’ in public life is less to promote a principled opposition to Western interference in the affairs of other states than to institutionalise a politics of precaution in which every nation is encouraged to batten down the hatches lest ‘another Iraq’ occur. Between this nervous isolationism and the imperial hubris of those who smashed Iraq, there’s something else: internationalism, a support for democratic liberation everywhere. Israel has a right to defend itself against anti-Semitic tyrants, and Iranians have the right to choose who rules them – those are my uneasy positions.

John Spencer: What Is the Bomb Israel Needs from the U.S. to Quickly Destroy Fordow?

Why Fordow Is the Ultimate MOP Target
The Fordow facility is not just underground. It is inside a mountain, roughly 260 to 295 feet below the surface. Iran’s engineers designed it to survive even advanced airstrikes. The facility is thought to be constructed beneath at least 80 meters of rock, potentially reinforced by concrete and blast-resistant barriers. It is one of the most protected uranium enrichment plants on Earth.

Fordow’s depth and fortification render it immune to standard air-to-ground munitions. Even advanced Israeli bunker busters like the GBU-28 would likely fail to reach the centrifuge halls.

Some analysts believe that two MOPs may be required to guarantee mission success at Fordow. The first would weaken or breach the protective layers, and the second, following in short succession, could then reach and detonate inside the heart of the facility. This tandem-strike approach would maximize the likelihood of collapsing the internal chambers or destroying centrifuges beyond repair.

Could Fordow Be Attacked Another Way?
While the GBU-57 is the most capable conventional weapon for destroying the Fordow facility, it is not the only potential option. Israel has demonstrated alternative approaches, most notably in Operation Many Ways in 2024, where Israel conducted a complex, multi-domain campaign deep inside Syrian territory. That operation involved deception, intelligence penetration, cyber disruption, precision strikes, and a special forces raid on the ground to eliminate the high-value missile construction facility by placing explosive inside it and then extracting the Israeli soldiers. A similarly bold campaign could theoretically be designed to target Fordow, possibly involving cyber attacks to disable critical systems, electronic warfare, or even special operations forces inserted to destroy key components from within. However, such an approach would carry significantly higher risks, including mission failure, and loss of personnel. Compared to these contingencies, the GBU-57 remains the most direct, reliable, and strategically low-risk option to ensure the physical destruction of Fordow’s deeply buried enrichment infrastructure.

A Strategic Choice for the United States
As Israel weighs its military options against Iran’s rapidly advancing nuclear program, the question is not whether it has the will to strike Fordow. It is whether it has the means. The United States is the only country in the world with the capability to field the GBU-57. Granting Israel access to the weapon would involve not only transferring the munition but also addressing the delivery platform, a logistical and geopolitical decision of the highest order.

There is no substitute for the GBU-57 in this mission set. It is not just the bomb Israel needs. It is the only bomb that can do the job.

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06/17 Links Pt2: Kasparov: Israel Won’t Fall for the Illusion of Stability; Leftists for the ayatollah?; Trump: Greatest Peacemaker of the Century

From Ian:

Garry Kasparov: Israel Won’t Fall for the Illusion of Stability

Pour one out for Ben Rhodes. In some ways, The World as It Is is a perfect title for the longtime Obama foreign policy adviser’s memoir, because the illusion of the status quo is all that Rhodes and his fellow travelers could ever stomach in geopolitics. But it was always just that: an illusion. Rhodes never really looked at the world as it is; he simply imagined a facade of post–Cold War stability. The historic Israeli military campaign against Iran that began last week represents another crack in that facade, joining the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the annexation of Crimea, and the Arab Spring.

After spending the past year and a half knocking out one Iranian proxy after another, Israel has dealt the Islamic Republic a heavy blow in recent days. Not just militarily, but politically too. Israeli forces killed a number of senior officials in Tehran, including the chief of staff of the military, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the commander of the IRGC’s Aerospace Force, and a senior adviser to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. And that was just in the first few hours. I suspect that the occupational hazards associated with employment in the Iranian government will continue to grow with each passing day.

Now that the Islamic Republic is severely weakened, the alarmist foreign policy commentariat is apprising us of the unacceptable risks, raising their well-worn red flags. (Or should I say white flags?) “Escalation!” “Global war!” And the ultimate enemy of the status quo: “regime change!” In the shadow of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, I don’t doubt that Rhodes and some like him had good intentions, but we all know what the road to hell is paved with.

Under President Obama, American officials frequently stared down the nastiest offenders in the international rogues’ gallery and insisted that there was “no military solution.” “No military solution” might sound nice to enlightened ears. Unfortunately, it’s a meaningless slogan. Tellingly, Russian officials repeat it all the time too. The Russian ambassador to the UN used that Ben Rhodes-esque turn of phrase at the Security Council, declaring that “no military solution can be legitimate or viable” in Iran. But Russia does believe there are military solutions to its problems—ask any Ukrainian, Syrian, or Georgian. Yet too many in Washington remain determined to fight armed marauders with flowery words.

The initial takeaway from Rhodes on the well-earned battering that the Iranian regime has received was that “this war will above all harm innocent people for no good reason.”

In the shadow of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, I don’t doubt that Rhodes and some like him had good intentions, but we all know what the road to hell is paved with.

Notice the reliance on the future tense. Status-quo huggers hide behind fear of what might happen instead of confronting the brutal truth of what’s actually happened or is happening. Call it a preference for deadly reality over frightening uncertainty.

Andrew Fox: Israel’s bold, and dangerous, gamble

So what does ‘success’ look like for each side? For Israel, the best-case scenario in Iran is that a combination of internal unrest, elite fragmentation and sustained sabotage, along with airstrikes, either collapse the regime or force it to retreat from its nuclear programme. The second-best outcome would be a significant delay to Iran’s nuclear programme, perhaps buying a decade or more. The worst-case scenario is that Iran weathers the storm and sprints for a bomb.

For Iran, ‘success’ means surviving the onslaught while projecting strength, deterring future attacks through visible retaliation and perhaps leveraging the threat of nuclear capability to force concessions. If Tehran can maintain regional influence, continue enrichment and keep Israel guessing, it will consider that a strategic win. The Iranians may accept Trump’s offer of a deal to reconsider their nuclear ambitions, although this would represent a humbling strategic defeat.

There is a darker prospect, too: unending escalation. This cycle could spiral into a painful and damaging campaign of attrition for both sides. Should Iran refuse to compromise, firmly on the back foot and battered from the skies, it is conceivable that Israel will escalate. This could mean striking at the political leadership itself, and forcing the regime change Israel is currently only hinting at.

Which brings us to the crucial question: how does this de-escalate? At present, it does not. Neither side is incentivised to back down. Israel views a nuclear Iran as an existential threat; Iran perceives Israeli aggression as justification for doubling down. The lack of a credible mediator and the erosion of American deterrence highlight just how fragile the situation is.

One path to stability may lie in backchannel diplomacy, particularly if the US and Gulf states can persuade Iran to halt enrichment in exchange for an end to hostilities. However, Israel’s leadership seems to have little faith in diplomacy and no desire for a pause. They believe time is not on their side.

Israel’s absolute penetration of Iran’s security environment and its total air supremacy over its enemy’s capital city should be understood as both a message and a warning. It says: ‘We are inside your defences. We can strike you at will.’ It also reveals a strategic conundrum. Israel has embarked on a campaign that may be beyond its means to finish. Effective as these strikes are, they may not stop Iran’s nuclear drive and might even accelerate it.

What began with a covert drone strike has now turned into open conflict. Rockets are being fired at Israeli cities and airstrikes are lighting up the skies over Tehran. Israel is gambling on precision, pressure and psychological warfare to bring down a regime it hopes to bomb into submission. Iran is betting that it can absorb the blows, outlast its enemies and emerge nuclear-armed. Both sides are pushing the boundaries of strategy and restraint.

Right now, neither side has the option to stop. Both are willing to find out what happens when they do not. Whatever happens next could shape the Middle East for decades.

Michael Oren: Trump: Greatest Peacemaker of the Century

For many years now, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, American diplomacy on Iran has focused on curbing its nuclear program. Successive presidents have pledged to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. But that approach, however admirable, did not seek to deny Iran the ability to make nuclear weapons nor did it address what was euphemistically called Iran’s “malign behavior.”

That behavior includes Iran’s status as the world’s foremost state sponsor of terror attacks that have claimed countless lives on multiple continents. The regime has murdered Iranian dissidents around the world and tried to assassinate senior American officials, among them President Trump. The Islamic Republic has supplied the missiles and drones used to kill thousands of Ukrainians and helped ignite the current disastrous Middle East war by backing Hamas and Hezbollah. The regime enabled Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad to massacre a half million of his own countrymen and the Houthi terrorists in Yemen to block international shipping. Pro-Iranian militias launched dozens of attacks against US bases in Iraq, Jordan, and Syria killing and wounding American soldiers. And the Ayatollahs did all this while brutally oppressing their own people, women, LGBT+, and ethnic minorities especially. Malign behavior indeed.

By insisting that Iran not only limit its nuclear program but dismantle it, President Trump is the first world leader to ensure that the regime will neither have nuclear weapons now nor the means to produce them in the future. But once the Ayatollahs are defeated or overthrown, the president can achieve vastly more.

The president can end Iran’s support for global terror, its backing of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, and its supply of the weapons that kill Ukrainians. The president can guarantee the sovereignty of Syria and Lebanon and the demilitarization of Yemen and Gaza. Through President Trump’s diplomacy, Iranians can once again enjoy freedom.

The fall of the Islamic Republic’s empire can give rise to peace between Israel and Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and possibly Iran itself. A ceasefire deal can be achieved in Gaza and all of the Israeli hostages released. The Middle East will be thoroughly and stunningly transformed. President Trump will be hailed as modern history’s greatest peacemaker.

David Harsanyi: Iran is nothing like the Iraq War

Iran, of course, has been an enemy of the U.S. for over four decades, regularly taking American citizens hostage, hatching assassination plots against U.S. leaders, undermining U.S. interests in the Middle East, and threatening Gulf allies and international shipping lanes. Iran is responsible for the death of over 600 American troops, or approximately 1 in every 6 combat fatalities in Iraq, maiming thousands of others. Imagine how fundamentalist Islamic leadership would conduct itself with nuclear warheads.

It is, in case anyone has forgotten, the longtime position of the U.S. that Iran should not possess nuclear weapons. This was, ostensibly at least, the purpose of former President Barack Obama’s deal with the mullahs. Remember that Ben Rhodes’s “echo chamber” narrative was conceived to gin up support for the failed Iran deal. Trump, who backed out of that disastrous agreement, has on multiple occasions not only unequivocally stated that Iran would be denied nuclear weapons, but that he would allow Israel to take out the program. “Hit the nuclear first and worry about the rest later” does not sound like the sentiments of a neoconservative nation builder but a pragmatic Western leader.

Though Israelis have likely funded and employed public relations efforts to boost the prospect of internal opposition groups, not one leader has ever expressed any interest in landing troops on Iranian soil for any occupation to make it happen. If Iranians want to depose the Khamenei regime, and they have shown repeatedly that they do, they will have to do the hard work themselves.

For Israel, the strategic goal is clear: degrade, hopefully destroy, Iran’s ability to produce a nuclear bomb. Israel is trying to win a war of survival, not remake the Middle East. Numerous outlets have reported that Israel has asked the U.S. to participate in strikes. This might be true, or it might be information warfare. Perhaps the story was planted to scare the Iranians into surrendering. Perhaps Israel could use help destroying the Fordow nuclear facility, buried deep under the mountainside. Doing so would be in our best interests as well.

As of this writing, however, there is no evidence that the U.S. has engaged in any combat missions. The Iranians, thus far, haven’t attacked any American bases in the region because the last thing they need is further pulling us into the conflict.

And it’s about time rogue terrorist regimes were terrified of the U.S. again.

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06/17 Links Pt1: Israel cannot settle for a temporary military win, it must topple the Islamic regime; The Simple Reasons Behind Trump’s Support for ‘Operation Rising Lion’

From Ian:

Armin Rosen: Can Israel End Iran’s Nuclear Program?

The United States is the only country in the world with the ability to destroy the Fordow nuclear facility quickly from the air, something we could accomplish by dropping a couple 15-ton Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs on the most important and heavily protected piece of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. Such a strike would potentially reset the entirety of international arms control.

Since the early 1970s, the world has depended on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) regime, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and the U.N. Security Council to maintain a global system that regulates the spread and development of nuclear weapons technology, placing American adversaries like China and Russia at the apex of the arms control system and creating layers of bureaucracy and diplomacy that would-be proliferators have learned to exploit. Pakistan, India, and North Korea have all built nuclear arsenals in defiance of the NPT. Until this week, Iran was very close to joining them.

The global arms control regime never considered Fordow—or, for that matter, Yongbyon, the site of North Korea’s nuclear breakthroughs in the mid-’90s—to be sufficiently serious a threat to global peace to warrant military action. Interestingly enough, the three most recent instances of a country using force to stop an in-progress nuclear program—namely, the Israeli attacks on Iraq, Syria, and Iran—were launched by a state that isn’t a signatory to the NPT. So far the United States has declined to attack North Korean and Iranian nuclear sites. If Donald Trump were to reverse course and bomb Fordow, he would reorient all of global nonproliferation around American strategic judgment and leadership. A successful U.S. attack on Fordow would establish a precedent that a would-be atomic scofflaw couldn’t ignore, with Washington acting as the final bulwark against the spread of nuclear weapons in cases where the NPT regime failed.

But what if Trump decides stanching the tide of nuclear weapons is a job better left to the Chinas and Russias of the world? What if the Israelis are really on their own here? One of the big unknowns of Operation Rising Lion is the extent of the damage Israel has been able to inflict on the Iranian nuclear program so far. Clarifying the issue requires both scientific expertise and deep knowledge of the entire Iranian nuclear-industrial complex.

Almost no one on earth is more qualified to talk about Israel’s progress against the Iranian bomb than the physicist and former IAEA inspector David Albright, founder and president of the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS). The institute has already published a detailed summary of the likely impact of Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. I spoke to Albright on Monday afternoon to get an update on where things stand. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Israel cannot settle for a temporary military win, it must topple the Islamic regime

Israel’s immediate military actions have, by all accounts, been successful in degrading Tehran’s most critical threats. The three pillars of the regime's threat – its nuclear program, its ballistic missile arsenal, and its global terror network – have been shaken. But to believe these setbacks are permanent is to ignore decades of history. The Islamic Republic’s ambition is resilient. Its nuclear program, though damaged, retains its most crucial asset: the knowledge to build a bomb. The scientists may be gone, the centrifuges shattered, but the blueprints remain. History shows us that after every setback, Tehran has rebuilt its program with greater speed, sophistication, and secrecy. To allow this regime to survive is to guarantee that it will rise from the rubble more determined than ever to cross the nuclear threshold, this time building deeper, more fortified sites, and learning from every Israeli success.

Similarly, its ballistic missile program is not merely a strategic asset; it is a core pillar of its regional dominance and its primary threat against the Israeli home front. While stockpiles can be destroyed and launch sites cratered, the industrial base and the engineering expertise remain. The regime’s leaders are driven by ideological and strategic imperative to maintain and advance this capability. They will rebuild, and they will aim for missiles that are faster, more precise, and capable of overwhelming any defense system.

Finally, the regime’s tentacular support for terrorism has been its primary method of waging war for decades. From Hezbollah in Lebanon to the Houthis in Yemen and militias in Iraq, this proxy network is Iran’s way of bleeding its enemies without risking a direct state-on-state war. Disrupting weapons convoys and eliminating commanders are necessary tactical actions, but they do not address the source of the cancer. As long as the head of the snake remains in Tehran, it will continue to fund, arm, and direct its legion of proxies to sow chaos and violence on Israel’s borders.

The nature of this regime is not subject to negotiation. It will not be pacified by diplomacy or deterred by temporary military defeats. Its commitment to regional hegemony and the destruction of Israel is woven into its very DNA.

Therefore, Israel faces a stark choice. It can heed the calls for de-escalation, enjoy a fleeting moment of victory, and allow a wounded and vengeful regime to reconstitute its strength for the next, more lethal, round. Or, it can commit to a policy that sees this conflict through to its only logical conclusion: to topple the regime once and for all. It is time to stop trimming the branches of the poison tree and focus on uprooting it entirely.

Andrew Fox: How This Phase of the Israel-Iran War Will End

With that being said, Andrew Fox is fairly optimistic, writing that “this war is won already.” He explains:

Israeli air supremacy has decimated Iran’s military infrastructure. At the same time, Iran’s missile salvos appear to be diminishing in scale daily as the IDF degrades Iranian launcher capability. Missiles have been intercepted for the most part, although they continue to inflict casualties.

Although Iran insists it will not negotiate under fire, its backchannel diplomacy conveys a different narrative. The regime seeks a face-saving way out. This is a surrender.

But the details of a negotiated peace could vary, and in the worst-case scenario, Fox writes,

the regime would frame it as a heroic stand: Iran “resisted Zionist aggression,” inflicted damage on Israel, and emerged intact. State media would highlight Israeli casualties and missile damage as proof of Iranian strength, while portraying international ceasefire efforts as evidence that the world fears Iran’s power. This narrative of resilience could temporarily bolster the regime’s fragile legitimacy.

However, this “victory” would be highly costly and precarious. Israeli strikes have devastated Iran’s military infrastructure, degraded the leadership of the [Revolutionary Guard], and set back its nuclear program, albeit not permanently. The economy, already crippled by sanctions, would be in an even worse condition, with oil facilities, airports, and industrial sites all damaged. Rebuilding would take years.

If Iran does not find a way to reach a deal, Israel will capitalize on its advantage and try to collapse the Iranian regime. The IDF, having achieved air supremacy, will target the regime’s backbone: command bunkers, nuclear facilities, oil infrastructure, and symbols of state authority.

At this stage, there is nothing at all to stop Israel from relentlessly pounding Iran until it surrenders. There seems to be no shortage of ammunition, and American resupply can happen at will. Despite international media attempts to portray a tit-for-tat scenario, it has been an overwhelming victory for Israel. This is not even a debate.

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06/16 Links Pt2: Israel’s actions are a favour to Europe – but don’t expect a thank you; France walls off Israeli pavilion at Paris Air Show; The march of the useful idiots

From Ian:

Israel’s actions are a favour to Europe – but don’t expect a thank you

Blame Hollywood if you like, but Britain has drifted into that cliché scene where by-standers beg the hero not to cut the red wire. This week’s by-standers are Cabinet ministers and assorted world leaders, panicked that Israeli pilots might finish the job on Iran’s nuclear programme. The talk is all about “de-escalation”, as though you can politely handcuff a centrifuge and hope it learns some manners. Yet the red wire in question is attached to Tehran’s nuclear-bomb-in-waiting, and – brace yourself – Israel is prepared to yank it out.

Let’s admit what the diplomatic communiqués whisper: Iran is not enriching uranium for a school science prize. The International Atomic Energy Agency counts hundreds of kilos sitting at 60 per cent, a couple of turns from weapons-grade. Strap that payload to an intermediate-range Shahab and the footprint stretches far beyond Tel Aviv to nearby Europe. If you want a working definition of “clear and present danger”, that’s it – especially when the regime boasts that its reach is now “continental”.

Meanwhile, every time you map the region’s misery you find Tehran’s fingerprints. Hezbollah’s missiles in Lebanon, Hamas’s tunnels in Gaza, Shia militias turning Iraqi highways into shooting galleries, Houthis lobbing drones across the Red Sea – each a franchise in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ terror food-court. Pay, train, arm, repeat. The ayatollahs have franchised terror into a geopolitical Deliveroo – dispatching proxy couriers who drop rockets on Israel and drones on Red Sea shipping.

Against that backdrop, the suggestion that Israel must be reined in feels almost zoological – like silencing the guard dog while the burglar assembles Semtex in the neighbourhood. Yes, Israel’s operations spark unease; a bombing run is nobody’s idea of diplomacy. But allowing Iran to complete its nuclear sprint would be more than an escalation: it would be a time-release calamity.

Israel’s pilots and engineers are, in effect, buying the civilised world time that sanctions, resolutions and strongly worded letters never could. Knocking out centrifuges today means fewer warheads tomorrow, and fewer warheads means no regional arms race in 2030. In the cold arithmetic of strategy, that is a favour to every European capital even if they’re too squeamish to send so much as a thank-you tweet.

NYT's Editorial: Antisemitism Is an Urgent Problem. Too Many People Are Making Excuses.

Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident, has suggested a “3D” test for when criticism of Israel crosses into antisemitism, with the D’s being delegitimization, demonization and double standards. Progressive rhetoric has regularly failed that test in recent years. “Americans generally have greater ability to identify Jew hatred when it comes from the hard right and less ability and comfort to call out Jew hatred when it comes from the hard left or radical Islamism,” said Rachel Fish, an adviser to Brandeis University’s Presidential Initiative on Antisemitism.

Consider the double standard that leads to a fixation on Israel’s human rights record and little campus activism about the records of China, Russia, Sudan, Venezuela or almost any other country. Consider how often left-leaning groups suggest that the world’s one Jewish state should not exist and express admiration for Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis — Iran-backed terrorist groups that brag about murdering Jews. Consider how often people use “Zionist” as a slur — an echo of Soviet propaganda from the Cold War — and call for the exclusion of Zionists from public spaces. The definition of a Zionist is somebody who supports the existence of Israel.

Historical comparisons can also be instructive. The period since Oct. 7, 2023, is hardly the first time that global events have contributed to a surge in hate crimes against a specific group. Asian Americans were the victims in 2020 and 2021 after the Covid pandemic began in China. Muslim Americans were the victims after Sept. 11, 2001. In those periods, a few fringe voices, largely on the far right, tried to justify the hate, but the response from much of American society was denunciation. President George W. Bush visited a mosque on Sept. 17, 2001, and proclaimed, “Islam is peace.” During Covid, displays of Asian allyship filled social media.

Recent experience has been different in a couple of ways. One, the attacks against Jews have been even more numerous and violent, as the F.B.I. data shows. Two, the condemnation has been quieter and at times tellingly agonized. University leaders have often felt uncomfortable decrying antisemitism without also decrying Islamophobia. Islamophobia, to be clear, is a real problem that deserves attention on its own. Yet antisemitism seems to be a rare type of bigotry that some intellectuals are uncomfortable rebuking without caveat. After the Sept. 11 attacks, they did not feel the need to rebuke both Islamophobia and antisemitism. Nor should they have. People should be able to denounce a growing form of hatred without ritually denouncing other forms.

Alarmingly, the antisemitic rhetoric of both the political right and the left has filtered into justifications for violence. But there has been an asymmetry in recognizing the connections. After a gunman murdered 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, observers correctly noted that he had become radicalized partly through racist right-wing social media. There has been a similar phenomenon in some recent attacks, this time with the assailants using the language of the left.

The man who burned marchers in Colorado shouted “Free Palestine!” and (awkwardly) “End Zionist!” The man charged with killing the young Israeli Embassy workers in Washington last month is suspected of having posted an online manifesto titled “Escalate for Gaza, Bring the War Home.” His supporters have since published a petition that includes “Globalize the Intifada.” The demonizing, delegitimizing rhetoric of the right bore some responsibility for the Pittsburgh massacre; the demonizing, delegitimizing rhetoric of the left bears some responsibility for the recent attacks.

Americans should be able to recognize the nuanced nature of many political debates while also recognizing that antisemitism has become an urgent problem. It is a different problem — and in many ways, a narrower one — than racism. Antisemitism has not produced shocking gaps in income, wealth and life expectancy in today’s America. Yet the new antisemitism has left Jewish Americans at a greater risk of being victimized by a hate crime than any other group. Many Jews live with fears that they never expected to experience in this country.

No political arguments or ideological context can justify that bigotry. The choice is between denouncing it fully and encouraging an even broader explosion of hate.

Is The Simple Truth: ‘Progressives Hate Jews’?

We all know the saying – and apparent truism – that there will be peace in the Middle East when the Palestinians start loving their children more than they hate the Jews. But it seems increasingly apparent to me that something similar applies to so-called “progressive politics”. Campaigning organizations might one day achieve their campaigning goals when they value those goals more than they hate the Jews.

Last week we saw the unedifying spectacle of Environmental Campaigner Greta Thunburg – who only a short while ago claimed the “climate emergency” was the biggest existential threat to the planet. Of course, it wasn’t so great an emergency that she couldn’t take time out from it to deliver some groceries to Gaza as if she were Tuesday’s ‘Hello Fresh’ drop-off driver.

The Israel-Iran war gives us a few new examples of where anti-Israel activism seems to override the urgency of primary campaigning. Almost all of these groups state that their values include human rights, democracy, rights and protections for women and sexual minorities, and so on. So when they appear to condemn Israel – a society where these values have legal force – over Iran – where these values are forced to their knees – is there any conclusion other than this one?

“Progressives hate Jews so much that they are willing to support a theocratic dictatorship that stands against almost all of their core values against a Jewish state which reflects most of those values.”

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) apparently stands for a world free from the threat of nuclear war. So you’d think they’d be quite pleased when a mad theocracy on the verge of acquiring a nuclear bomb is stopped. But of course they aren’t.

“The British government must end its support for nuclear-armed Israel’s illegal war on Iran – a war based on lies used to justify attempts at regime change that risks widening a humanitarian catastrophe,” they raged.

Similarly, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) condemned Israel’s attacks on the grounds that attacking nuclear facilities might cause an environmental disaster. “Nuclear facilities must never be attacked,” scolded the agency head, Rafael Mariano Grossi. His organization is dedicated, they say, to “nuclear non-proliferation, disarmament, and to promote cooperation in peaceful uses of nuclear energy.”

Of course they don’t appear to have a plan to stop a rogue state weaponizing nuclear power other than to hope for the best while condemning any practical efforts to stop them. Perhaps they subscribe to the view formulated by President Barack Obama ten years ago. How’s that turning out?

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06/16 Links Pt1: Eight Israelis killed in five Iranian missile strikes; The Ultimate Deception: How Trump and Bibi Outfoxed Iran; IAEA: All centrifuges at Iran main's enrichment plant severely damaged

From Ian:

Eight Israelis killed in five Iranian missile strikes

Eight Israelis were killed by Iranian missile strikes in five locations that occurred Sunday night and early Monday morning.

In the central Israeli city of Petach Tikva, five people were killed in a residential building, and in adjacent Bnei Brak, an 80-year-old man was found dead at the site of a missile strike.

Two of the people killed in Petach Tikva were inside their safe room, which was directly hit by a missile. Israel’s Home Front Command explained that safe rooms are built to protect from shrapnel, shards and shock waves, but not a direct hit, which is a rare occurrence. The Home Front Command emphasized that everyone else in the building who was in a safe room was not even injured. Petach Tikva Mayor Rami Grinberg said that the residence was struck by a ballistic missile carrying hundreds of kilograms of explosives.

Tel Aviv sustained two direct missile strikes, one of which lightly damaged the U.S. Embassy Branch Office. U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee clarified that “the minor damage to the property were from the shock waves … from the nearby blast … No injuries, thank God!”

Among the residents evacuated from buildings in Tel Aviv was a six-day-old baby, whose mother was found minutes later.

In Haifa, three people were found dead under the rubble of a burning building where a missile hit, and about 300 people were evacuated. The Israel Electric Corporation said that the strike damaged its power grid, and that “teams are working on the ground to neutralize safety hazards, in particular the risk of electrocution.” Maritime risk assessment company Ambrey reported a fire at the Haifa Port.

Israel continued to intercept Iranian and Houthi drones heading to Israel’s north on Monday morning.

About 50 Israeli fighter jets and aircraft struck some 100 military targets in Isfahan in central Iran overnight, the IDF Spokesperson’s Office said on Monday.

Among those targets were missile storage sites, surface-to-surface missile launchers and command centers. Israel has destroyed over 120 missile launchers since the beginning of the operation, about a third of Iran’s total launchers. In one strike overnight, the IAF identified an attempt to launch missiles towards Israel in real time and destroyed the cell and missiles.

The IDF confirmed on Monday that it killed the head of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps intelligence Mohammad Kazemi and his deputy, Hassan Mohaqiq, on Sunday.

The IDF also struck a command center of the Quds Force, part of the IRGC, for the first time, according to the IDF spokesperson. The Quds Force “planned acts of terror against Israel through the Iranian regime’s proxies in the Middle East.”

Israel also reportedly struck near nuclear sites in Fordow. The Wall Street Journal reported that parts of the underground nuclear enrichment site in Natanz collapsed as a result of Israeli strikes.

The IAF struck Mashhad, in eastern Iran, on Sunday afternoon, destroying an Iranian refueling aircraft. Mashhad, some 2300 km (1429 mi) away from Israel, is the farthest Israeli fighter jets have flown in Iran, and, according to some experts, the farthest in any Israeli operation, ever.

The Israeli Navy used a new air defense system called Thunder Shield and LRAD long-range interceptors on Sa’ar 6 ships to intercept eight Iranian drones overnight. The seaborne systems, which have intercepted some 25 projectiles since the beginning of Operation Rising Lion on Thursday night, are able to intercept UAVs, cruise missiles, sea-to-land missiles and more.

Seth Mandel: The World Had 30 Years of Israeli Restraint and Failed to Stop Iran

Notice a pattern? Israeli leaders take steps for peace and then ask one thing of the West: to help prevent Iran from sabotaging the process before it can go any further.

In 2012, Shimon Peres—Israel’s “dreamer,” the only person as closely associated with the peace process as Rabin—was asked by CNN about Israel’s willingness to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program, even taking lethal action against those responsible for the program. Peres responded: “If you have enough information about a certain person which is a ticking clock that can explode a bomb that can endanger civilian life, clearly you have to prevent him from doing so.”

Meanwhile, plans for Iran’s nuclear program began back in the 1980s. These plans were put into action in the 1990s as Iran sought to build nuclear bombs within about a decade. Before that time was up, however, it’s illicit facilities were revealed and efforts were made to try to freeze the project. Iran ignored its diplomatic obligations and in 2005 was found to be noncompliant by the International Atomic Energy Agency. This happened again mere days ago. President Obama’s JCPOA was intended to delay Iran’s nuclear breakout beyond his presidency, but the deal itself foreclosed the possibility of reliable verification so mostly what it did was give Tehran relief from sanctions and enable it to set the Middle East on fire while still pursuing nuclear weapons.

In all those years, presidents of both parties engaged Iran diplomatically over its nuclear program. Such an offer of diplomacy remains on the table.

It is self-discrediting to ask “Why didn’t they try diplomacy?” It is self-discrediting to claim that this war is a result of Benjamin Netanyahu’s “obsession.” The record is crystal clear: Thirty years of restraint were rewarded with violence and subterfuge. And so those 30 years of restraint have come to a close.

Seth Mandel: Israel-Iran Conflict Has Already Proved the Necessity of ‘Operation Rising Lion’

We don’t know how many missiles have been shot or how many have been intercepted, and some appeared to have failed to make the trip all the way to Israel and landed somewhere along the way. But as of Sunday there were 17 sites of impact, the New York Times reported. The missiles are being fired at population centers—while Israel is hitting military targets, the Iranians are simply launching war crime after war crime. The regime in Tehran has the advantage here of not coming under international pressure to avoid crimes against humanity, because their victims are Jews. Kenneth Roth, a preposterously cretinous anti-Zionist who used to run a pretend “human rights” organization and now teaches at Princeton, has even been out there justifying Iran’s strikes like the totalitarian regime mouthpiece he strives to be.

And missiles are hitting densely populated neighborhoods, the Times notes, just the shockwaves alone are damaging. One expert told the paper that Iran had fired one kind of missile at Israel for the first time: the Shahed Haj Qassem. It is a solid-fuel medium-range ballistic missile that the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control identifies as one of the newer types that Iran likely intends to outfit with a nuclear warhead if the regime ever crosses that goal line.

To simplify: Iran is practicing nuking Tel Aviv.

Iranian firepower isn’t only a threat to Israel. Russia has relied on Iranian-made drones and ballistic and cruise missiles in its war on Ukraine. As CSIS notes, both Russia and China—Iran’s benefactors—have so-called firepower-strike strategies in their respective war doctrines. Every Iranian missile benefits all three, giving our European allies plenty of reason to stop complaining about Israel’s preemptive actions.

An Iranian nuclear umbrella would put the world at risk, and for that reason alone Israel deserves the full support of the West. But from Israel’s perspective, the buildup of a large-enough ballistic-missile stockpile to overwhelm Israeli defenses is absolutely a threat that must be eliminated, and soon.

John Spencer: Redefining Shock and Awe: What We Can Learn from Israel’s Opening of Operation Rising Lion

Imagine if Operation Overlord in World War II began with the elimination of Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of the German High Command; Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS; Field Marshal Erwin Rommel; numerous other senior generals; and the destruction of all of Germany’s air defenses, before a single Allied soldier landed on the beaches of Normandy. That’s not an exaggerated hypothetical. It’s a near-parallel to what Israel just did to Iran.

Israel’s war against Iran is still ongoing. But what has already unfolded will be studied for decades.

Israel's current military operation against Iran is officially called Operation Rising Lion, launched on June 13, 2025, with a sweeping and precise preemptive strike. The operation was not just historic. It was transformational. It redefined what shock and awe can look like in the 21st century.

This was not merely a strike. It was a campaign—a layered, synchronized demonstration of modern operational art, built on deep intelligence, strategic deception, and the innovative fusion of old and new tools of war. Here's what it teaches us.

1. Surprise as a Core Element of Operational Art
Israel’s campaign against Iran is a textbook case in modern operational art. It wasn’t just an airstrike. It was a synchronized, multi-domain offensive that combined cyber, human intelligence, electronic warfare, airpower, special operations, and psychological operations.

Israel achieved surprise at the highest level. It launched a campaign that disrupted Iranian defenses before the first fighter jet even crossed the border. This is not warfare of the past. This is what large-scale, intelligence-driven combat looks like in 2025. The decisive moment in war often arrives long before the first bomb drops.

2. Deep Intelligence Penetration and Human Terrain Dominance
Perhaps the most stunning revelation is the depth to which Mossad and Israeli intelligence had penetrated Iran’s inner military and nuclear circles. They not only knew where nuclear scientists and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commanders were located. They manipulated meeting schedules and lured multiple top generals into the same underground facility to be eliminated simultaneously.

Confirmed kills include:
Chief of Staff Maj. Gen. Mohammad Hossein Bagheri
IRGC Commander Maj. Gen. Hossein Salami
Khatam al-Anbia HQ Commander Maj. Gen. Gholam Ali Rashid
IRGC Aerospace Force Commander Maj. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh
Nine nuclear scientists

These were not replaceable figures. Many had served for decades and had no peer backups. Their loss was not just symbolic. It decapitated Iran’s ability to coordinate large-scale retaliation.

Additionally, Quds Force Commander Esmail Qaani was struck, along with over 20 senior commanders targeted and eliminated in the first night alone. This wasn’t just a blow. It was a beheading of Iran’s strategic brain trust.

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06/15 Links: Sharansky: We're Witnessing a Historic Test of Assumptions about Israel; 11 killed, 200 injured, 3 missing as Iranian missiles pound Israel

From Ian:

Yair Rosenberg: The War Israel Was Ready to Fight

On October 7, 2023, Israel suffered the most catastrophic assault in its history when Hamas terrorists killed more than 1,000 people and took hundreds of others hostage. Almost a year later, Israel assassinated Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, the most powerful militia in the world, along with the entire leadership of his organization. Last night, it did the same to the rulers of Iran, eliminating the heads of the regime’s armed forces, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and regional proxies.

How could the same country that was bested by a ragtag militia in its own backyard turn around and ravage multiple regional powers with devastating decapitation strikes? The dissonance between these events has fomented confusion and conspiracy theories. But Israel’s successes and failures in the past 20 months stem from a single source. A very specific plan to stop Iran led to both the disaster of October 7 and the triumphs since.

For decades, Iran’s theocratic leaders have called for Israel’s destruction, denying the Nazi Holocaust while urging another one. The regime funneled millions of dollars and thousands of missiles to proxies on Israel’s borders and beyond: Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen. Iran’s authorities constructed monuments to their predicted victory, displaying missiles emblazoned with the words Death to Israel and even erecting a countdown clock to Israel’s end.

Israel, a nation born out of the ashes of an attempted Jewish genocide, took these threats seriously. Just as Iran labeled America “the Great Satan” and Israel “the Little Satan,” Israel’s security establishment conceived of its adversaries in tiers: Iran was the biggest threat, its fearsome proxy Hezbollah ranked next, and the smaller Hamas posed the least danger. The Israelis prioritized their resources accordingly. Their best people—and best exploding beepers—were put to work countering Iran and Hezbollah, which had formidable arsenals of advanced weapons. Hamas, by contrast, was treated as an afterthought, contained behind a blockade of Gaza that was maintained less by manpower than by advanced security technology.

October 7 exposed this folly, as Hamas and its allies disabled that technology and stormed across the border on land, meeting little resistance as they rampaged through civilian communities. This was a war Israel did not expect and was not prepared to fight. That fact was evident not only in the casualties and hostage-taking during the massacre, but in the grinding, brutal, and haphazard war in Gaza that has followed. Simply put, Israel was flying without radar. It did not know Hamas’s capabilities, had not infiltrated its leadership, did not have widespread intelligence sources on the ground, and was largely ignorant of the group’s sprawling underground infrastructure in Gaza. This operational ignorance has resulted in a horrific meat grinder of a war with thousands of civilian casualties and still no end in sight. It’s also why Israel’s military took more than a year after October 7 to find and kill the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.

By the time that happened, Israel had already taken out Hezbollah’s Nasrallah, a far more protected and high-value target, after neutralizing many of his elite forces via exploding beepers and walkie-talkies and blowing up many of the group’s missiles while they were still in storage. The very resources that had not been brought to bear on Hamas, thus enabling the disaster of October 7, achieved the neutralization of Hezbollah within weeks.

Hezbollah had joined in the attacks on Israel after the assault on October 7, apparently believing that Israel was too hobbled to respond beyond token tit-for-tat strikes. Likewise, the group’s patrons in Iran may have misread the events of October 7 as evidence of fundamental Israeli weakness, rather than a terrible but isolated error. For months, Tehran continued to supply its proxies in Lebanon and Yemen with advanced missiles to fire at Israel, seemingly under the belief that it would be immune from similar incoming in response. That mistake, like Israel’s on October 7, proved costly.

Natan Sharansky: We're Witnessing a Historic Test of Assumptions about Israel

The Israeli government has launched a targeted military assault against the Islamic Republic of Iran, striking its military facilities, nuclear sites and top military leadership. We are witnessing the historic test of the assumption that Israel cannot eliminate the Iranian nuclear threat without active U.S. involvement.

As successive U.S. governments chose the path of diplomacy, Tehran inched closer and closer to obtaining nuclear weapons. And so, after decades of failed international negotiations, Israel decided to wage its battle without America's direct participation. The Jewish state's very existence hangs in the balance.

In conversations I had with Iranians over the past few months, two narratives emerged. Those closer to the government predicted that a war would rally citizens around the regime and thereby strengthen its grip. Dissidents, on the other hand, insisted that an attack limited to nuclear and military targets, and even extending to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps but sparing civilians and ordinary soldiers, would help their cause by exposing and deepening the regime's fragility.

Iran’s Target Isn’t Just Israel. It’s Us

Israel has struck a blow to prevent Iran from developing nuclear bombs - weapons that it might credibly use toward its stated goal of removing Israel from the planet. This is not simply a matter of regional security. This conflict is a central front in a global contest in which the forces of tyranny and violence in recent years have been gaining ground against the forces of freedom, which too often are demoralized and divided.

In a world full of bad actors, Iran is the most aggressive and dangerous totalitarian force of our time. Its leaders seek to weaken and destroy free society, democracy and human rights with Russian and Chinese support. In Iran, women are systematically oppressed and abused. Homosexuals are murdered. Those who think differently are imprisoned and tortured. According to official state doctrine, the primary goal of the mullahs in Tehran is the annihilation of the State of Israel. Clocks in the streets of Tehran count down to the "destruction of Israel." But Israel is only the first target. Once Israel falls, Europe and America will be the focus. Radical Sunni and Shiite Islamism has been preparing for this for decades. Their attacks are directed against our values, our way of life.

It is therefore surprising that Israel is not being celebrated worldwide for its historic, extremely precise and necessary strike against Iranian nuclear weapons facilities and for the targeted killing of leading terrorists. America and Europe, in their own interests alone, must stand united with Israel.

Jake Wallis Simons: Israel Can See what Europe Can't: the Devil

Ayatollah Khamenei's pet theology lusts after the apocalypse. Triggered by the obliteration of Israel, this cataclysm will supposedly herald the arrival of the "Mahdi" to lead Shia forces to global victory. These are the convictions that drive actual Iranian foreign policy. When Jerusalem was forced to act, you'd have thought the West would rally. But no. Israel was the bad guy.

We have seen this movie before. When Jerusalem destroyed Saddam Hussein's nuclear program in 1981, the world was appalled. Two decades later, the White House quietly acknowledged that the Jews had done everybody a favor.

The countries that will thrive will be those with conviction in their values and the courage and resilience to defend them. As Menachem Begin observed, "The world may not necessarily like the fighting Jew, but the world will have to take account of him." The Devil exists. It makes no sense to appease him.

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06/14 Links: The Return of Peace Through Strength; IDF: We control the sky over Tehran and western Iran; Five Arab Christians killed, at least 23 wounded Haifa

From Ian:

The Return of Peace Through Strength

This uniparty of Obama administration veterans, other left-wingers, and self-proclaimed MAGA leaders shrieked in horror at the blow Israel administered to the "death to America" crowd. Tucker Carlson whined that Trump was "complicit in the act of war." Failed vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz plaintively hoped on Friday that "it might be the Chinese" who could "negotiate some type of agreement … and hold the moral authority."

This smooth-brained bigotry masquerading as strategic analysis led the United States into a dilemma where its biggest enemy in the region, which has attacked Americans at home and abroad continuously for nearly half a century, was within days of getting the bomb.

Trump is not nearly such a fool. Unlike those ideologues, he is a shrewd judge of power and knows that his base loves allies who fight their own battles and defeat America’s enemies. "I told Iran they should settle," he told the Washington Free Beacon Friday. "If I were them, I would want to settle." In the past few weeks, Trump and Netanyahu initiated a textbook deception campaign that caught Iran’s leadership completely by surprise. "I always knew the date," Trump assured the New York Post, "because I know everything."

Most of Iran’s senior leaders did not survive long enough to discover their blunder, and the initial Iranian attempt at retaliation was a pathetic failure: Israel crippled the ayatollah’s ballistic missile force while Iran’s Lebanese lackey, Hezbollah, practically begged Israel to let it stay out of the fight. As of this writing, another wave of Israeli aircraft is above Iran again.

This is but the latest battle in the war that Iran began on Oct. 7, and the going could get tougher as Iranian forces reorganize. Israel has reportedly sent many of Iran’s top nuclear scientists to their eternal reward, but the nuclear facilities are still intact.

"Let me be clear," Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Thursday night. "Iran should not target U.S. interests or personnel." Two American destroyers that can intercept Iranian missiles sailed toward Israel on Friday. These are good first steps. He and his subordinates should give the Israelis the time they need to finish the job. Encouraging British prime minister Keir Starmer to borrow a spine from French president Emmanuel Macron would be good.

Removing Iran’s nuclear arsenal is also a priority. It is possible that Israel will not be able to reach some of the more fortified Iranian facilities using conventional explosives. Since this is an existential battle for Israel, it would be prudent to resolve that problem by either convincing what remains of Iran’s leadership to surrender its entire nuclear program or by offering Israel some of our much larger bunker busters.

"I think it's been excellent," Trump told ABC. "We gave them a chance [to negotiate] and they didn't take it. They got hit hard, very hard ... And there's more to come. A lot more." During Trump’s first campaign, many observed that the best way to understand the future president was to take him seriously, not literally. It turns out that when he said he wanted peace through strength, he meant it both ways.

How Israel’s Operation Rising Lion Dismantled Iran from Within: A Case Study in the Art of Deception

IV. Iran’s Response: Operational Weakness with Long-Term Costs
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei vowed that Israel would face a “bitter and painful” fate. As part of its initial response, Tehran launched over 100 drones toward Israeli territory. Israel’s Home Front Command promptly issued a nationwide alert, instructing civilians to remain near bomb shelters. Yet within a few hours, Israel’s air defenses had neutralized Iran’s drone swarm.

The level of Israeli infiltration exposed during Operation Rising Lion has immediate and long-term consequences for the Iranian regime. Penetration of Iran’s air defense systems, intelligence networks, and internal military infrastructure indicates a loss of control at the core of the state. This not only compromises operational security but also undermines institutional trust within the IRGC, Quds Force, and the broader intelligence establishment. When command structures can no longer distinguish between internal loyalty and external manipulation, decision-making slows, risk tolerance narrows, and factionalism grows. Over time, this environment fosters paranoia, internal purges, and bureaucratic paralysis—conditions that steadily degrade the regime’s capacity to project power, manage crises, and maintain cohesion. First, despite its threats of a forceful response, Tehran has failed to impose meaningful costs on a technologically and operationally superior adversary. What was billed as a major reprisal has largely amounted to symbolic gestures aimed at domestic audiences rather than tangible battlefield outcomes.

Second, the limitations of Iran’s response are raising doubts among its regional partners—particularly the Houthis and Hezbollah—about Tehran’s reliability as the core of the anti-Israel axis. If Iran cannot effectively retaliate when directly targeted, its credibility as a deterrent umbrella weakens across the region.

Third, the growing disconnect between Khamenei’s rhetoric and Iran’s operational reality is eroding internal cohesion. In a regime where legitimacy depends heavily on projecting strength, visible failure—especially in the face of Israeli dominance—risks deepening public skepticism and unsettling elite consensus.

If these trends continue, a deeper strategic unraveling is possible. The erosion of deterrence abroad and legitimacy at home could trigger fragmentation within Iran’s security institutions, elite defection, and increased pressure from peripheral regions. What begins as a military failure may evolve into political instability—and, over time, the disintegration of the centralized system that has held the Islamic Republic together for over four decades.

Israel, by contrast, has demonstrated control over both the military and psychological dimensions of the conflict. It has absorbed Iranian strikes with minimal disruption, maintained national composure, and reinforced its dominance in both the air and information domains. The broader message is unmistakable: Israel sets the tempo and terms. Iran is reacting—and falling behind.

V. Lessons for the United States
As the US continues to lead diplomatic efforts to contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Operation Rising Lion provides a concrete demonstration of what effective counterproliferation requires. The operation serves as a reminder that diplomacy needs to be backed by credible power, intelligence superiority, and close coordination with trusted partners. Below are seven lessons the operation offers on counterproliferation, escalation control, and the enduring value of US–Israel cooperation.

1. Counterproliferation requires covert penetration, not just monitoring.
Israel did not rely on external enforcement bodies or treaty frameworks. Instead, it embedded operatives, pre-positioned strike assets, and built a parallel intelligence architecture capable of degrading Iran’s nuclear infrastructure from within. This highlights (a) the limitations of verification regimes for dealing with a regime committed to concealment and (b) the importance of backing passive oversight with the threat of active disruption.

2. Eliminating strategic human capital halts weaponization at its source.
Rather than only targeting facilities, Israel removed the intellectual and operational drivers of Iran’s nuclear program. Scientists, engineers, and senior planners with years of accumulated expertise were taken out of the equation. This approach addresses the roots of the problem in a way that no air strike on a centrifuge site could.

3. Strategic surprise prevents escalatory cascades.
The strike achieved total surprise—Iran received no warnings, distributed no alerts, and had no time for defensive repositioning. This prevented Tehran from activating contingency plans or engaging in calibrated escalation. Adversaries often expect a slow, bureaucratic Western response. But Israel showed that speed and surprise can shift the initiative and contain conflict escalation.

4. Hard power enforcement is essential when norms break down.
Israel acted while international institutions faltered. The Islamic Republic had repeatedly breached enrichment thresholds and obstructed inspections. Rather than wait for diplomatic consensus, Israel imposed a hard ceiling on Iran’s capabilities. This demonstrates that in certain cases, decisive action is not an alternative to diplomacy—it is a necessary mechanism to enforce negotiated terms.

5. Israel functions as a regional nonproliferation anchor.
Multilateral efforts often collapse under political pressure. Israel has proven willing and able to act when others are not. By destroying components of Iran’s nuclear and military infrastructure, Israel preserved regional stability and enforced red lines that others had only articulated. This establishes Israel as a frontline actor in global nonproliferation.

6. Negotiation leverage is built on the battlefield, not at the table.
The US entered nuclear talks with Iran hoping to restrain enrichment through diplomacy. Israel countered by altering the facts on the ground. By eliminating Iran’s top nuclear scientists and strategic planners, it dramatically weakened Tehran’s position in negotiations. The lesson: diplomatic strength is a function of prior operational advantage.

7. Intelligence without enforcement undermines deterrence.
US intelligence has long tracked Iran’s violations. But it has rarely translated that into meaningful action. Israel showed what happens when intelligence is fused with political will. Washington should recognize that delaying enforcement for fear of escalation undermines the credibility of US commitments.

VI. The Triumph of Strategic Vision
Operation Rising Lion demonstrated how modern warfare is shaped by perception, disruption, and initiative. Israel dismantled core elements of Iran’s command structure, eliminated key personnel tied to nuclear development, and exposed the gaps in Iran’s internal defenses. More critically, it disrupted the strategic logic that underpins Iran’s regional posture. Tehran had assumed that escalation could be delayed, that its territorial depth provided insulation, and that Israel would remain constrained by political and diplomatic pressures. On June 13 those assumptions collapsed.

The consequences extend beyond Iran’s borders. The regime’s ability to coordinate and direct its regional proxy network—Hezbollah, the Houthis, and various Iraqi and Syrian militias—relies on centralized guidance and perceived strength. By targeting senior IRGC figures and degrading logistical hubs, Israel introduced friction and fragmentation across this network. What appeared to be an integrated deterrence structure now faces a leadership vacuum and a credibility crisis.

For policymakers in Washington, the operation underscores a broader reality: dominance in modern conflict depends on the ability to preempt, conceal, and control tempo. Israel acted without delay, executed with precision, and achieved its objectives before Iran could respond. In this environment, military advantage is no longer defined by scale, but by the capacity to identify vulnerabilities and exploit them without warning.

This Is What ‘Never Again’ Means By Abe Greenwald

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None of it ultimately was enough. As of 2x4 hours ago, Iran was months away from having a nuclear weapon. So Operation Rising Lion was a necessity. What we saw last night, and what will continue in the coming weeks, is what “never again” means. It doesn’t mean convincing the masses that Israel is a nice country full of nice people. It doesn’t mean “winning the PR war.” It doesn’t mean showing bottomless restraint against enemies. And it doesn’t mean pleading for protection from others. It means Jews destroying those who are trying to kill them.

Golda Meir described Israel’s nuclear capacity as varenye, a fruit preserve that Eastern European Jews had kept close at hand in the event of a pogrom. The pogrom came to Israel on October 7, 2023. It turns out, Israel didn’t need to respond with nuclear weapons. Rather, it launched a fierce military campaign and multiple ingenious operations to destroy the surrounding Iran-backed armies that sought to snuff out the Jewish people.

Almost two years after Hamas’s attack, October 7 is starting to look a lot like December 7. The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor set in motion a war that would level imperial Japan like no country has been leveled in the history of man. Similarly, it seems that Iran and its terrorist proxies sealed their own fate when they decided to wage a multifront war on Israel.

Jew-hatred has swelled into a popular global campaign since October 7. But despite the pro-terrorist mobs and shootings and fire bombings and international bullying of Jews and Israel, I’ve looked on at events with a sense of equipoise. I’ve been enraged and saddened and perplexed like every other Jew during this period. But there has always been something counterbalancing the negative. This was my faith—my certainty—that Israel understood with exquisite clarity what “never again” means, and it would go to any length required to ensure the survival of Am Yisrael. It does, and it is. And that’s all that matters.

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06/13 Links Pt2: Walking Through a Supernova; Douglas Murray on death cults, Joe Rogan, and profoundly unserious people; Macron's conference touting Palestinian statehood postponed

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Walking Through a Supernova

In the weeks after Palestinian terrorists killed nearly 400 people at an Israeli music festival on Oct. 7, 2023, a growing corps of citizen-volunteers trekked to the site of the massacre to collect the personal items left behind. The group warehoused the items and organized and tagged them so survivors and the relatives of victims could retrieve them. The police saw the effort as helpful to their investigation: Once they’d studied and recorded the scene, the items could bring forward witnesses or others with information.

When I saw some of these items on display in Washington DC on Thursday, at a pre-opening walkthrough of the Nova Exhibition at Gallery Place, where it will be open to the public from June 14 through July 6, they conjured a different image entirely. I found myself staring at a pile of shoes collected from the site of the massacre and thought of the only place I’d seen its kind before: at a Holocaust memorial.

It also helped me understand why the survivors of the Nova massacre who serve as guides to the exhibition kept asking me how I felt about what I was seeing and experiencing. That these various scenes would hit people differently was taken for granted.

However it hits you, it does so immediately. The first staging area is a recreated Nova campground. The twist is that almost everything you see was actually at the 2023 Nova festival. These tents aren’t replicas. Only the people who lived in them for the weekend are missing.

In and around the tents are people’s clothing, shoes, board games, even a burned up cigarette butt and the occasional can of deodorant. Cellphones are plugged into wall chargers and strewn throughout the campground; they are playing loops of videos from Oct. 7—some survivors’ videos, some taken by Hamas terrorists themselves. The campsites attest to the joyful atmosphere of the festival—one has a tree sign hanging next to it that says “HAPPY PLACE”; another has a simple pair of wings hanging from a pole.

The dark irony of the scene is that the Nova festival itself isn’t seen merely as a music event but also as a healing one. The setting—breathtaking open fields in the desert—combined with the trance music that dominates the festival draws many who are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, for example. As survivor Maya Izoutcheev pointed out, concertgoers dance through the night and don’t see their fellow dancers around them until the sun rises, giving them a sense of privacy and of a close-knit shared experience at the same time.

The Right Way to Sanction the Muslim Brotherhood

While the Iranian regime’s ideology is Shiite, its founders were inspired by the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood. The original Islamist group, the Brotherhood is the root from which Hamas, al-Qaeda, and Islamic State sprang; its motto declares that “jihad is our way and dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope” and anti-Semitism is a cornerstone of its ideology. At the same time, it is not a single organization, but consists of disparate groups in countries across the globe—some actively engaged in terrorism, others dedicated to spreading their hateful ideology peacefully. This reality is a complication for the Trump administration, which is considering sanctions on the Brotherhood.

Jonathan Schanzer explains that rather than simply issue an executive order that the next administration could appeal, the White House should instruct the Treasury Department to level anti-terrorism sanctions against specific branches of the Brotherhood as the evidence dictates:

The Brotherhood in Yemen (the Islah Party, which partners with the Houthis) and Jordan (where a violent Brotherhood plot was recently broken up by the government) are very likely to meet [Treasury Department] criteria. From there, the Treasury could begin to expand the network to other affiliates that meet [these] criteria.

The Treasury Department’s process offers the opportunity, over time, to designate the entire Muslim Brotherhood. When evidence points to certain branches or individuals from the Brotherhood’s disparate branches providing financial, technical, or material support to groups already under sanctions, they themselves become targets for designation.

Macron-backed U.N. conference touting Palestinian statehood postponed

French President Emmanuel Macron announced on Friday that his upcoming United Nations conference with Saudi Arabia promoting international recognition of a Palestinian state has been postponed following Israel’s attack on Iran.

Speaking to reporters from Paris, Macron said that the conference would need to be rescheduled for logistical purposes, citing the inability of Palestinian Authority officials to travel to U.N. headquarters in New York next week to participate.

The Trump administration was opposed to the conference, titled “The High Level International Conference for the Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine and the Implementation of the Two-State Solution,” and urged U.N. member states against participating. Pro-Israel Republicans on Capitol Hill also criticized the gathering, which was scheduled to take place June 17-20, as a distraction from U.S. efforts to secure peace in the region.

Despite his campaign for Palestinian statehood recognition, Macron was quick to defend Israel’s strikes on Iran, releasing a statement early Friday criticizing Tehran for its nuclear program and supporting Israel’s right to self-defense. At his press conference later Friday, he argued that Iran was heavily responsible for the current unrest in the Middle East by building its nuclear program against the requests of the West and other actors in the region.

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06/13 Links Pt1: Zionism Has Been Vindicated; A surgical strike against Islamist tyranny; Israeli woman killed in Iranian missile strike

From Ian:

John Podhoretz: Zionism Has Been Vindicated

Twenty-four years ago, Iran’s president, the Ayatollah Rafsanjani—a supposed “moderate”—spoke these words only months after September 11 made the world aware of the mass-murdering nature of the Islamist threat to the West: “If one day, the Islamic world is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now, then the imperialists’ strategy will reach a standstill because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. However, it will only harm the Islamic world.” In other words, damage might be done outside Israel if there were to be a nuclear exchange, but that would be worth it, because Israel would cease to exist.

In 2005, Rafsanjani was succeeded by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who began to make even more explicit what Rafsanjani had implied: “Thanks to people’s wishes and God’s will, the trend for the existence of the Zionist regime is downwards….The Zionist regime will be wiped out soon.” For decades, Iranian mullahs and leaders had chanted “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” but this was something different. Iran’s nuclear ambitions were real and the purpose of going nuclear was millenarian and apocalyptic and aimed at the Jews.

In the days, weeks, months, and years to come, we will learn some, if not all, of what Israel determined it needed to do to slow down, halt, and destroy Iran’s apocalyptic ambitions. The nature of the operation, or operations, is likely to dwarf any such military/intelligence effort ever before seen on this earth. And it happened because it had to happen. Because Israel is real. Because Israel is a nation of 9 million and was not going to allow itself to be destroyed.

More important, the execution of this plan followed Israel’s greatest military and intelligence failure—the failure to keep track of Hamas’s evildoing, under the assumption that Israel had had Hamas contained and without the ability to strike catastrophically. Perhaps we can surmise that Israel’s desire to believe it had neutralized the Hamas threat using missile and rocket defenses had something to do with the depth of focus and the amount of energy its leaders were expending to watch and plan and develop weaponry and countermeasures against Iran. Perhaps they just didn’t have (as we say these days) enough “bandwidth” for both.

But the catastrophe of October 7 also revealed just how determined Iran was to put its plan to destroy Israel into action, and thereby triggered Israel’s own ultimate countermeasures—the war in Gaza, the destruction of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the elimination of Iran’s air defenses, and now the determination to rid the world of Iran’s nuclear sites, its ambitions for nuclearization, and perhaps even the destruction of the Iranian regime.

One stands mute at the audacity of the planning and the magnificence (thus far) of the execution. And one wonders, yet again, if what is happening here is once more a sign not just of Israel finding its own salvation in Jewish self-rule–but of God’s providence.

Melanie Phillips: The nightmare scenario arrives

The final chapter in the Iran nuclear crisis may now be upon us.

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Congress that there were “plenty of indications” that Iran was actively moving toward a nuclear weapon.

There have been numerous reports that Israel is preparing to strike Iran’s nuclear sites in the coming days. Washington has withdrawn non-essential staff from its Baghdad embassy and has approved a voluntary evacuation from U.S. embassies and locations throughout the region.

The expectation of imminent attack may or may not be premature. We may be watching another episode of brinkmanship as yet another negotiating ploy.

What does seem certain is that Iran has now reached the nightmare point that has been feared for so long—that it is about to assemble a nuclear weapon.

Israel can’t tolerate that. If President Donald Trump decides that the United States won’t join an attack on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, then Israel is preparing to go it alone, even though that would restrict it to damaging the nuclear sites rather than totally destroying them.

Since the Hamas-led atrocities in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the West has refused to acknowledge that Israel has been subjected to a seven-front war of extermination waged by Iran and its proxies.

This denial goes back decades. Even though the Iranian regime declared war against America and the West from the moment it came to power in 1979, political and media discussion of the Iranian issue has remained wholly inadequate and infested by disinformation spread by the regime through all-too gullible policy elites.

The fact that Iran insists that it won’t abandon its right to uranium enrichment, or that the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog has now declared Iran in breach of its non-proliferation obligations for the first time in 20 years, will probably make precious little difference to such people.

This is because the narrative upon which the West is fixated holds that Israel is the driver of events in the Middle East, and that its war against the Palestinian Arabs is the principal cause of instability and violence in the region.

Why Israeli Strikes on Iran Make America Safer

Noah Rothman provides a worthwhile reminder of why a nuclear Iran is a threat not just to Israel, but to the United States:
For one, Iran is the foremost state sponsor of terrorism on earth. It exports terrorists and arms throughout the region and beyond, and there are no guarantees that it won’t play a similarly reckless game with nuclear material. At minimum, the terrorist elements in Iran’s orbit would be emboldened by Iran’s new nuclear might. Their numbers would surely grow, as would their willingness to court risk.

Iran maintains the largest arsenal of ballistic missiles in the region. It can certainly deliver a warhead to targets inside the Middle East, and it’s fast-tracking the development of space-launch vehicles that can threaten the U.S. mainland. Even if Tehran were a rational actor that could be reliably deterred, an acknowledged Iranian bomb would kick-start a race toward nuclear proliferation in the region. The Saudis, the Turks, the Egyptians, and others would probably be compelled to seek their own nuclear deterrents, leading to an infinitely more complex security environment.

In the meantime, Iran would be able to blackmail the West, allowing it occasionally to choke off the trade and energy exports that transit the Persian Gulf and to engage in far more reckless acts of international terrorism.

As for the possible consequences, Rothman observes:
Iranian retaliation might be measured with the understanding that if it’s not properly calibrated, the U.S. and Israel could begin taking out Iranian command-and-control targets next. If the symbols of the regime begin crumbling, the oppressed Iranian people might find the courage to finish the job. If there’s anything the mullahs fear more than the U.S. military, it’s their own citizens.

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