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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: We're at war. Now what? [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-06-22
We begin today with Helene Cooper, Eric Schmitt, and Julian E. Barnes of The New York Times reporting about the United States attack on Iranian nuclear facilities yesterday.
President Trump announced on social media that three Iranian sites were hit, including the mountain facility at Fordo. The bombs used in the strikes are believed to include “bunker busters,” which are designed to destroy deep underground bunkers or well-buried weapons in highly protected facilities. A U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss confidential intelligence said that multiple 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs were dropped on Fordo, and that initial damage assessments indicated that the facility had been “taken off the table.” The strikes, whether successful or not, are likely to trigger a fierce response. Tehran has vowed to strike at American bases in the Middle East, and American intelligence agencies confirmed before the strikes took place that Iran would take steps to widen the war and hit U.S. forces in the region.
Tom Nichols of The Atlantic wonders what comes next in the Israel/Iran/United States hostilities.
So what’s next? Before considering the range of possibilities, it’s important to recognize how much we cannot know at this moment. The president’s statement tonight was a farrago of contradictions: He said, for example, that the main Iranian nuclear sites were “completely and totally obliterated”—but it will take time to assess the damage, and he has no way of knowing this. He claimed that the Iranian program has been destroyed—but added that there are still “many targets” left. He said that Iran could suffer even more in the coming days—but the White House has reportedly assured Iran through back channels that these strikes were, basically, a one-and-done, and that no further U.S. action is forthcoming. [...] Only one outcome is certain: Hypocrisy in the region and around the world will reach galactic levels as nations wring their hands and silently pray that the B-2s carrying the bunker-buster bombs did their job. Beyond that, the most optimistic view is that the introduction of American muscle into this war will produce a humiliating end to Iran’s long-standing nuclear ambitions, enable more political disorder in Iran, and finally create the conditions for the fall of the mullahs. This may have been the Israeli plan from the start: Despite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s warnings about the imminence of an Iranian nuclear-weapons capability and the need to engage in preemption, this was a preventive war. The Israelis could not destroy sites such as Fordow without the Americans. Israeli military actions suggest that Netanyahu was trying to increase the chances of regime change in Tehran while making a side bet on dragging Trump into the fray and outsourcing the tougher nuclear targets to the United States.
David Remnick of The New Yorker talked to an expert on Iran about the U.S. attack
In recent days, polls have shown that a majority of the American people, including a majority of the President’s supporters, opposed going to war with Iran. By ordering these strikes, Trump acted without congressional approval and in contradiction to his campaign promise to avoid the kind of disasters experienced in Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan. I recently wrote a piece reviewing many of the dangers and possibilities that could follow an American bombing in Iran. After hearing the news, I immediately called one of the country’s most knowledgeable experts on Iran, Karim Sadjadpour. He is a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and worked as an analyst with the International Crisis Group in Tehran, from 2003 to 2005. “I’m in shock,” Sadjadpour told me, about ten minutes after Trump’s announcement. “I’m sitting here watching this on CNN and trying to see the reaction on Persian-language Twitter.” “This is unprecedented, dropping a thirty-thousand-pound bomb,” he continued. “Anyone who has observed the last two decades of history in the Middle East would think hard about unleashing such an attack. You would want to think several steps ahead, and there is no evidence that the President has done that. His tweet and his public comments have given the impression that this is the end of war and the commencement of peace, but I suspect the Iranians think differently. They have a program on which they have spent hundreds of billions of dollars. The regime—perhaps not the people, but the regime—takes pride in that and now it is destroyed. No dictatorship wants to look emasculated and humiliated in the eyes of its own people.” The question now is how Iran will respond. “If the Ayatollah [Ali Khamenei] responds weakly, he loses face,” Sadjadpour said. “If he responds too strongly, he could lose his head.”
Perhaps the weight of this “bunker-buster” bomb is unprecedented but the United States did use at least one similar weapon in the 2001 attack on Tora Bora in Afghanistan and in 2017 against the Islamic State. The attack against the Islamic State with bunker-busters was also in Afghanistan.
Ilan Goldenberg writes for Foreign Affairs, looking at a number of possible ways that Iran could retaliate, including closing the Strait of Hormuz
To be sure, Iran would think twice before closing the Strait of Hormuz. The countries that would suffer the most pain from such an action are China—the largest purchaser of Gulf oil—and the Gulf states themselves. Iran’s entire strategy over the past few years has been to build better relations with both China and Gulf countries in order to end its diplomatic isolation. Going after oil shipping would leave Iran very much alone, which is why even now world oil markets view this as a relatively low probability, pricing in only a 10 percent increase in the global oil price since fighting started on June 13. It is entirely plausible that in the aftermath of these U.S. strikes, the situation does not escalate. Iran could launch a limited number of missiles at U.S. targets that cause few or no casualties. Trump chooses to take the Iranian strikes and ends the cycle of escalation, and Israel, satisfied with the outcomes of the war, also holds back. Given the number of variables, however, much will depend on the wisdom and restraint of Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khameini, and the people around them. And that does not bode well in the short or long term. In the long term, the outcomes from the decision to strike Iran are hugely uncertain. It is highly implausible that, as some in Israel and the United States hope, these attacks will precipitate the collapse of the Iranian regime. The regime still has the guns and there is no ground force coming to invade Iran and topple the Islamic Republic. This isn’t Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, a country that was ravaged and hollowed out by a decade of civil war before the regime collapsed in December 2024. And even if the conflict and the death of so many senior Iranian officials does by some chance cause the regime to crumble, the instability and violence that would come with it would be unlikely to produce a democracy and could instead lead to a more radical leadership or a dangerous vacuum.
Stephanie Psaki and Nikki Romantik write for Just Security that the Trump regime is tearing down critical components of our nation's biodefense systems.
Tressie McMillian Cottom of The New York Times writes about the culture of fear and a few kinds of political violence that the Republican Party utilizes.
A culture of fear shrouds this administration from the consequences of its actions. Trump taunts. He threatens. He hides his violent language behind humor that’s less funny than plausibly deniable. His behavior sets the tone for greedy political attention hogs. There’s no shortage of them. They curry his favor because they want his power for themselves. I’m not just talking about politicians and pundits. Online, loyalists act out a presidential vision of power by harassing and dehumanizing those he marks as ugly, stupid, lazy, fat and generally subhuman. Trump is the Republican Party. That is settled. His violent talk is, then, the official political communication strategy of the ruling party and its followers. And that ruling party is stripping this country for parts. The online part of violent political speech makes the violence seem twee, as if it was something teenage girls do on TikTok. But online harassment ruins lives and breaks people by socially isolating them. We should have more respect for teenage girls now that the president of the United States is enforcing fealty using his own burn book. The fact that harassment happens “online” makes it more violent, not less. Time does not exist online. Once upon a time, when a rumor threatened your ability to do your job or live your life offline, it was horrible. It was also bound to time and place. You could move or graduate or wait for people to get bored. But once a targeted harassment campaign goes virtual, it never ends. Every time someone shares the meme, the picture, the headline, the doctored video, the screenshot of your address, the clock starts again.
I had to look up “twee”.
Finally today, and on a somber yet hopeful note, on Friday my Substack feed was filled with notices of the death of Belgian philosopher and the Danforth Chair of Philosophy at Saint Louis University, Helen De Cruz.
I didn’t know their work, really. I had seen a good interview of De Cruz’s about academic publishing. They were forthcoming about their illness and knew that death was near. Their final post on their “Wondering Freely” Substack (which I read in real time, on May 28) is titled “Can’t take it with you” and it covers an eclectic array of subjects. So I am pushing fair use a bit.
I remember seeing Van Gogh’s Starry Night in Moma three years ago and being profoundly moved. I had seen so many reproductions, of course, but the original moved me in a way no reproduction could have prepared me for. Yet Van Gogh was in an asylum, deeply unhappy, depressed and working in bouts of frenzied productivity. He saw the sky through the window of the room he was confined in. We certainly wouldn’t say Van Gogh had a flourishing, eudaimonic life. But he contributes to our flourishing. At least, he did to mine, on my first trip after the height of pandemic when I saw his painting live in 2022. At funerals and other occasions we also notice that we cherish others for their quirks. Someone, say a recently deceased can be remembered as kind and loving, but also: he loved fishing and was a great Cardinals fan. It seems puzzling that being a sports fan contributes to someone’s virtue. But it does, because that was part of what made him who he is. Mark Alfano has done systematic studies on this by looking at obituaries and they show that the surviving relatives seem to think being a sports fan is a virtue. As is being a dancer or birder. [...] Audre Lorde and Spinoza helped me to see that being a good person means flourishing in many domains. Lorde saw herself as a poet foremost, as Caleb Ward explains in his monograph on Lorde (in progress). But she was also a Black woman, a mother, an activist, and a lesbian (“a woman who loves other women” as she called it). She insisted on being recognised in all her dimensions. Spinoza counterintuitively argued for an ethical egoism in Ethics. He says we need to benefit ourselves. But our selves are in his picture finite expressions of God. And in our limited way, we can be perfect. Becoming very rich, powerful or prestigious is not benefiting yourself because these are empty goods in his view. This explains why the richest man on earth is not happy and keeps on seeking validation. Also why this Turkish musician is probably happier living in relative simplicity. x x YouTube Video
That second paragraph is on point.
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