It’s hot, it’s summer, the kids are home, you want to enjoy the break and not wade through hundreds of articles, mostly about ephemera or written by the ill-informed, so I’m going to do it for you. This week I highlight a few reports which I find sound. Because of space constraints and copyright issues, I can’t post them in their entirety but urge you to do so at your leisure. I found these articles which focus on the war, on President Trump’s foreign policy, the pushback from COVID tyranny and the Supreme Court’s ruling on deference to experts, the most significant matters of the week.

Iran and Israel

Spencer Guard accurately described the initial Israel response to aggression against it by Iran:

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.

Israel keeps eliminating the leaders of Iran, their launchers and nuclear facilities, and Iran keeps pretending they want to negotiate. President Trump made clear his demands were not negotiable. Iran has to give up its nuclear facilities and aspirations.

As the week ended Trump made manifest his ability to enforce his threats: “It has now been confirmed that the USAF is deploying eight B-2A Spirit stealth heavy bombers from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri to Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, to use them during the incoming airstrikes on the underground missile bases of the IRGC and the underground uranium enrichment complex of Iran's Islamic regime at Fordow.”

While Israel has confined its actions as far as possible to regime and military targets, Iran has struck repeatedly at civilian sites, doubtless in the belief it will dispirit Israelis and force an end to the assault. 

John Smith describes why such a policy is fruitless: Israel cannot afford to falter.

Israel’s continued existence depends not on the benevolence of its neighbors, nor on the favor of international opinion, but on the steadfast application of its two greatest assets: intelligence and strength. Surrounded by hostile actors and ideologies that call openly for its destruction, Israel has no margin for error, no strategic depth, and no luxury of indecision. In this context, the Israeli state must retain and exercise the undeniable right to neutralize threats swiftly, decisively, and without apology.

Critics of Israeli military responses often disregard a fundamental truth: Israel is responding to existential aggression, not initiating it. The pattern is familiar to any honest observer -- rockets fired from schoolyards, suicide bombings planned in mosques, and terror tunnels dug under civilian homes. These are not accidental flare-ups. They are the deliberate tactics of adversaries whose stated goal is not peace, but annihilation.

To demand that Israel show restraint in the face of such provocation is to ask it to play by the rules of a world that has never protected the Jewish people. Time and again, Jewish history has demonstrated that when others are tasked with defending the Jew, the Jew dies. The lesson of the Holocaust, and of centuries of exile before it, is that Jewish survival must never depend on the conscience of outsiders. It must rest upon Jewish will, Jewish judgment, and Jewish power.

When Israel retaliates with force, it does so not out of vengeance, but out of necessity. Its actions are not disproportionate -- they are proportionate to the unique vulnerability and historical memory that shapes Israeli strategy. If Israel acts, it is because it has been compelled to act by those who leave it no other choice. The responsibility lies with the aggressors, whose continued campaign of terror, not Israeli deterrence, is the true moral outrage.

In the modern media age, perception is manipulated, footage is curated, and headlines often reverse cause and effect. But reality on the ground is unambiguous: no sovereign nation can survive if it allows itself to be murdered slowly for fear of being scolded quickly.

Israel, therefore, must be judged not by how often it fights, but by how often it is forced to fight -- and how successfully it does so while adhering to ethical constraints unmatched by its enemies. The call for peace, noble as it may sound, cannot be honored when the other side demands blood.

Understanding Trump

This week Pakistan nominated President Trump for a Nobel Peace prize for his work in negotiating a truce between it and India. We know of his achievement in the Abraham Accords which has pacified many in the Middle East. Less well known is how he brokered peace between the Congo and Rwanda, between Serbia and Kosovo, between Egypt and Ethiopia. He deserves the prize when Obama clearly never did. Trump’s every action in foreign affairs is to extend peace.

The President made it clear he will accept nothing less than an end to Iran’s nuclear ambitions.  Particularly as it refers to the underground Fordow nuclear installation, it has been unclear whether or not we will use our MOPs and B-2s to destroy them and whether or not Israel can do it on its own. He said he’d decide within two weeks. Victor David Hanson describes clearly Trump’s philosophy.

He was and is clearly a populist-nationalist: i.e., what in a cost-to-benefit analysis is in the best interests of the U.S. at home and its own particular agendas abroad? Trump did not like neo-conservatism because he never felt it was in our interests to spend blood and treasure on those who either did not deserve such largess, or who would never evolve in ways we thought they should, or whose fates were not central to our national interests. So-called, optional, bad-deal, and forever wars in the Middle East and their multitrillion-dollar costs would come ultimately at the expense of shorting Middle America back home. [snip] He sees Israel’s interests in neutering the nuclear agendas of the thuggish and dangerous Iran as strategically similar to those of our own and our allies -- but not necessarily tactically in every instance identically so. Thus, Trump wants the Iranian nuclear threat taken out by Israel -- if feasible. And he will help facilitate that aim logistically and diplomatically. If it is not possible for Israel to finish the task, in a cost-to-benefit analysis he will take it out -- but, again, only after he is convinced that the end of Iran’s nukes and our intervention far outweigh the dangers of a superpower intervention, attacks on U.S. installations in the region, a wider, ongoing American commitment, spiraling oil prices, or distractions or even injury to his ambitious domestic agenda. Trump is willing to talk to the Iranians, rarely insults their thuggish leaders, and wants to show that he always preferred exhausting negotiations to preemptive war. That patience allows him to say legitimately that force was his last choice -- as he sees all the alternatives waning. Thus, Iran’s fate was in its own hands, either to be a non-nuclear rich state analogous to the Gulf States but no longer a half-century rogue terrorist regime seeking to overturn and then appropriate the Middle East order and to threaten the West with nukes. Tactically, Trump thinks out loud. He offers numerous possible solutions, issues threats, and deadlines (some rhetorical or negotiable, others literal and ironclad). He alternates between sounding like a UN diplomat and a Cold War hawk, and sometime pivots and reverses himself as situations change. All this can confuse his allies, but perhaps confounds more his enemies. In sum, he believes as far as enemies go, public predictability is dangerous – unpredictability, even volatility, being the safer course. Add it all up, and there is a reason why Putin did not invade Ukraine during Trump’s first term; why for the first time in nearly 50 years the Middle East has some chance at normality with the demise of the Iran’s Shia crescent of terror; and why Europe and our Asian allies may be more irritated by Trump than by Obama and Biden, but also probably feel that he is more likely to defend their shared Western interests in extremis, and will lead a far stronger and more deterrent West than his predecessors, one that will prevent war by assuring others that it is suicidal to attack the U.S.

Charles Lipson details the considerations facing Trump respecting whether to use our planes and bombs on Fordow. In particular he explains that the president indicated he’d delay his decision for at most two weeks: He needs the final U.S. carrier strike group to arrive. (I think they are now in position); he needs time for Israel’s “air command to further degrade Iran’s ability to strike U.S. forces [about 40,000] in the region,” and he wants to give local opposition time to organize.

We Have the Domestic Tyrants' Number Now

Leaving the war aside, how government tyranny respecting COVID shattered trust in government and prompted a reckoning was an essay by Jeff Childers, in which he explains the dynamic:

The reckoning for the government’s pandemic overreach is bigger than any of us. All collective government rests on the foundational notion of consent of the governed. Consent, once given, is sticky. It’s not easily withdrawn. It took all the British Empire’s imperial arrogance to pry consent away from the colonists. (Remember tea taxes? That’s why this blog isn’t called Crumpets & Covid.)

But the pandemic’s authoritarian excess was worse than a thousand Tea Parties -- and I mean in the original, Boston Harbor sense (not the plucky pre-MAGA movement). Someday, I’ll diagram British colonial oppression next to pandemic policy and show you how perfectly they overlay. Only this time, it wasn’t just taxation without representation -- it was everything without representation. They trespassed us for speaking at school board meetings.

The pandemic pressure is not venting. It’s building. At worst, the public is crackling with revolutionary energy, primed for an explosive spark. At best, Americans feel like abused spouses -- waiting, complying, quietly keeping score, and watching for the first open door.

This moment, like a bad case of PTSD, is politically unsustainable without closure. Hence: the reckoning. It’s in the slow mail -- book rate from India, with stops in Karachi, Qatar, and Kalamazoo -- but it is en route. The package is guaranteed. It’s out for delivery. The order cannot be cancelled.

With the swish of an executive pen, they deleted the quaint illusion that we live in a real democracy, with checks and balances, due process, and all the rest. We’d naively believed it couldn’t happen. We were wrong. Our freedoms were more fragile and our rights more alienable than the civics books promised.

To keep our consent, the government must repair the relationship. And like any abused spouse, we need to see evidence that the abuse can never happen again. At least abusive spouses apologize. We haven’t even gotten the first apology yet.

Perhaps there’s something of this reckoning dynamic in this week’s Supreme Court decision in the Skrmetti case where the court rejected claims of medical consensus and expertise in finding Tennessee’s ban on medically sexually transitioning minors constitutional.

Justice Thomas’ dissent is a classic, among other criticisms, by denying “experts” authority to countermand the “wisdom, fairness or logic of legislative choice.” He states that it’s irrelevant to the democratic process whether major medical organizations agree with the Tennessee legislators. “To hold otherwise would permit elite sentiment to distort and stifle democratic debate under the guise of scientific judgment and would reduce judges to mere ‘spectators… in construing our Constitution,’”

The tyrants pulled off this listen-to-the-experts stunt during the COVID pandemic excess. We saw what enormous damage that caused and we fully grasp Thomas’ point.