“No plan survives first contact with the enemy” is a military dictum usually credited to Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, and more recently to the boxer Mike Tyson in the form “Everyone has a plan until he gets punched in the mouth.” The United States, in its war with Iran, is an unusual counterexample, insofar as it appears that the Trump administration did not have a plan.
Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that at the outset of the war, the United States and Israel sought to install former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Iran’s leader, after the anticipated fall of the Islamic Republic. The inauspicious first step in this brilliant plan was to blow up part of Ahmadinejad’s compound in an air strike on February 28 in the Narmak district of Tehran.
The line “I experience rage thinking about everything this administration has done” could probably have been written in an email to friends by any number of the attendees at last night’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. But the line was apparently written by a man who showed up with a shotgun and pistol and was ready to kill “most everyone” there to get to Donald Trump and assassinate him and his Cabinet.
The prediction that Iran will be America’s next Vietnam—a moral catastrophe, an abyss into which money and lives have been pitched, with the sole effect of weakening the United States and heartening its enemies—is already in general circulation among Americans. A few days ago, the Iranian embassy in Hanoi joined the doomsaying. Its X account featured an AI-generated image of a mouth-breathing American GI being lectured to by a smiling Vietnamese soldier in Saigon on April 30, 1975.
A few years ago in Dhahran, the Saudi state oil company, Aramco, gave me a tour of its headquarters, a facility so sparkling and orderly that one could forget that its whole purpose was to extract from the ground one of the filthiest substances on Earth. The most impressive stop on the tour was the Aramco emergency command center, which I imagine is paying its workers a lot of overtime right now. It looked like the control room for a mission to Alpha Centauri.
During the past two years, Iran and Israel have traded missile and air strikes three times, and by now, war between them is old news. War between Iran and the Gulf Arab states of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates, however, is something new. According to reports, Iran fired missiles at all of them this morning. This video appears to show an attack on Juffair, the area of Bahrain that hosts the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet.
The most memorable moment in the presidency of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro—at least until his kidnapping by Delta Force early this morning—came in 2017, when he accomplished the extraordinary feat of making the entire population of his country salivate with hunger simultaneously by taking a huge bite of an empanada on live television. It was as if President Donald Trump were to pause during an Oval Office address, then produce from a drawer in the Resolute Desk a fully loaded chili dog.
On Sunday, CBS’s flagship newsmagazine, 60 Minutes, opened as usual with the tick-tick-tick of its title sequence, a sound with Pavlovian resonance for millions of Boomers who have watched the show for most of their adult lives. This time the tick-tick-tick might as well have been a time bomb. Hours before the show aired, CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss pulled a story about the Trump administration’s deportation of hundreds of immigrants to CECOT, a notoriously harsh prison in El Salvador.
One of the minor annoyances of being an incorrigible pervert is that you risk having your own bookshelf testify against you. Some spines are better turned inward. A pederast might hide away Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, in which a middle-aged German author ogles a lithe young Polish boy. A hyper-literate rapist should camouflage his copy of A Clockwork Orange with a more consensual dust jacket.
Updated at 6:30 p.m. ET on December 15, 2025
On October 9, 2023—two days after the Hamas attacks on Israeli villages adjacent to Gaza—protesters gathered in front of the Sydney Opera House to chant angrily about the Jews. The chant sounded to many like Gas the Jews.
This afternoon, blocks from the White House, a man sneaked up on two West Virginia National Guardsmen and shot them in the head with a handgun. Both soldiers are reportedly in critical condition. A motive has not been determined, but a recent Afghan immigrant named Rahmanullah Lakanwal is in custody, according to CBS News. Early photos of the suspect show a burly, bearded man being wheeled almost naked into an ambulance.
The October 13 peace summit in Sharm al-Sheikh—where Donald Trump assembled more than 30 world leaders, including Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and (for some reason) the international soccer vizier Gianni Infantino—achieved, for about two hours, general agreement on a 20-point plan for Gaza. It had immediately freed the remaining 20 living Israeli hostages, in exchange for almost 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, plus assurances of an Israeli military withdrawal and an end to the war.
Today at 9:30 a.m., Air Force One made a low pass over Tel Aviv on its way into Ben Gurion Airport. The flight had more in common with an astronomical portent—a medieval comet, say, and all the swings in mood that might entail among the public—than a mere act of aviation. Israelis had stayed up for days in hopes that hostages would be released. The sight of the 747 meant: This is really happening. Within a few hours, it had happened.
Yesterday afternoon, at a Utah Valley University political event, hundreds of attendees watched the murder of 31-year-old Charlie Kirk, a conservative movement-builder and itinerant controversialist. Within hours, millions more had seen the gruesome video of the moment when, in mid-sentence, a bullet pierces Kirk’s throat and streams of blood issue forth. It did not look like a survivable wound, and I am sorry to say that it was not.
Today, Israel attacked Hamas, apparently targeting its lead negotiator, Khalil al-Hayya, in Doha, the capital of Qatar. This tactic is not endorsed in Getting to Yes or in any other guide to negotiation or international law. It is, however, consistent with the stated view of Israel’s leadership, which is that avowed members of a group engaged in ongoing acts of terror are valid targets wherever they happen to be.
This morning, Donald Trump claimed he knew nothing about the raid on the Maryland home of his former National Security Adviser John Bolton. “I’m not a fan of John Bolton,” Trump said, calling him a “lowlife.” In that respect he agrees with many Democrats: After Trump fired Bolton, in 2019, Representative Adam Schiff of California (now a senator) said that one “should question John Bolton’s patriotism,” and Representative Nancy Pelosi called him a “disgrace.
By carrying out air strikes on three Iranian nuclear sites last night, Donald Trump showed the fundamental error of American political ornithology: There have never been Iran hawks and Iran doves. There have been only doves. Every prior U.S. president, including Trump himself, has refrained from attacking Iranian territory, even in response to killings and attempted killings of Americans not only abroad but also on American soil.
The countries surrounding Iran have condemned Israel’s attack today. Some statements were more florid than others, and some were more convincing. Bahrain, whose monarchy Iran has repeatedly attempted to topple, urged Israel to de-escalate. Azerbaijan, whose secular government is constantly at odds with Iran, “resolutely” reproached Israel for its attack but gave no indication that it would cease being a resolute ally of Israel and the United States.
Smoke is still billowing from sites across Iran, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel just made a speech, in English, warning that Israel would keep attacking for “as many days as it takes” to eliminate the Iranian nuclear program. So far the catalog of damage is mostly rumor—tantalizing rumor, for Iran’s enemies, but rumor nonetheless.
On Wednesday night, as the guest at a banquet in New Haven, Connecticut, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir made light of his waistline—a rare joke from a man whose utterances are more often vile than funny. Even so, he managed to blend the two. He said that when he assumed office in 2022, he took steps to make the food served to Palestinian inmates in Israeli prisons less abundant and less palatable.
Finding someone whose politics you don’t like and using some flimsy excuse to put him in handcuffs is the kind of thing dictators do.
The man who murdered at least 15 people with his truck on Bourbon Street last night was flying the black banner of the Islamic State from his truck, according to the FBI. Police shot 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar dead at the scene. So far little else is known about the suspect, but since ISIS flags are not standard options in Ford F-150s, it is reasonable to presume that the driver—a U.S. Army veteran—committed mass murder as an homage to the Islamic State.
In the last scene of Terrence Malick’s 1973 film, Badlands, a recently arrested spree killer is sitting handcuffed next to a state trooper. Unperturbed by the prospect of the electric chair, the killer compliments the trooper’s state-issued Stetson. “You’re quite an individual, Kit,” the trooper says.
The fall of Aleppo this weekend surprised even the residents of Aleppo, so you can imagine how flabbergasted foreign analysts were, from thousands of miles away. As recently as a week ago, the Syrian civil war seemed to have reached a dismal equilibrium: The Syrian government controlled most major cities, including Aleppo, and had ceased progress in retaking insurgent enclaves in Syria’s north and east.
In 2008, Yahya Sinwar—then an inmate in Israel’s Eshel Prison—developed a brain tumor. An Israeli surgeon operated on his head and saved his life. Today, Israel announced that one of its snipers had done the opposite. Photos of the Hamas leader’s body, half-sunk in rubble and dust in Rafah, show a massive head wound. Sinwar’s killing ends a one-year manhunt but not the invasion that his decision to attack and kidnap Israeli civilians last year all but guaranteed.
On Monday, Tucker Carlson wrapped up the seventh in a series of speeches to right-wing Australian audiences. To attend the event, I had to walk under a bright-pink sign acknowledging that the “traditional owners” of the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre are an Aboriginal people, the Wurundjeri Wol Wurrung. Judging by the speech I heard, this sign was not put up at Carlson’s request.
This week, Israel released an appalling video featuring five female Israeli soldiers taken captive at Nahal Oz military base on October 7. Fearful and bloody, the women beg for their lives while Hamas fighters mill around and alternately threaten to kill them and compliment their appearance. The captors call the women “sabaya,” which Israel translated as “women who can get pregnant.
On April 1, Israel killed Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a senior official of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, by attacking Iran’s consulate in Damascus. Iran spent the next two weeks promising revenge, and the world tried to imagine what form that revenge might take. Missile strikes on the Golan Heights? Bombing an Israeli embassy? (Iran has practice at this one.
Updated at 2:05 p.m. ET on March 23, 2024
A decade ago, when foreign fighters were flowing into Syria, the Islamic State’s capital, Raqqa, became a sort of Epcot of global jihad: New arrivals from different nations clustered together in their national groups. If you were a recent arrival from France or just wanted to know where to get a croissant, you could visit a café full of French people and ask. Tens of thousands of foreign fighters came from places as distant as Chile and Japan.
Updated at 2:05 p.m. ET on March 23, 2024
A decade ago, when foreign fighters were flowing into Syria, the Islamic State’s capital, Raqqa, became a sort of Epcot of global jihad: New arrivals from different nations clustered together in their national groups. If you were a recent arrival from France or just wanted to know where to get a croissant, you could visit a café full of French people and ask. Tens of thousands of foreign fighters came from places as distant as Chile and Japan.