Dear Weekend Jolter,
For those accustomed to continental condemnation toward Israel on Gaza, European leaders' support for the nation's ferocious campaign to strike Iran's nuclear program was probably one of the many shocks of the past two weeks.
Consider these statements from German Chancellor Friedrich Merz:
“There is no reason for us, or for me personally, to criticize what Israel started a week ago, nor is there any reason to criticize what America did last weekend.”
"The evidence that Iran is continuing on its path to building a nuclear weapon can no longer be seriously disputed."
"This is dirty work that Israel is doing for all of us."
Merz noted that the actions were not "without risk" and has since turned attention back to Gaza in calling for a cease-fire there. Reactions from other top European leaders were more qualified regarding the Israeli-U.S. operation — but still supportive of the overall goal of preventing a nuclear-armed Iran and understanding of Israel's desire to eliminate that risk.
French President Emmanuel Macron said there was "no legality" to America's strikes, while acknowledging France "supports the objective of preventing Iran from getting the nuclear bomb." Earlier, he said Israeli strikes that hit "civilian or energy facilities" must stop, while conceding that Iran posed an “existential risk” for Israel. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, calling for de-escalation and negotiation, said in a video on X, "We've long had concerns about the Iranian nuclear program," and described the prospect of Iran getting a nuclear weapon as "the greatest threat to stability in the region."
A joint statement from all three leaders last weekend affirmed that Iran "can never have a nuclear weapon" and urged the country to engage in negotiations. It put the onus on Iran "not to take any further action that could destabilize the region."
Before the American strike, even European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen "reiterated Israel's right to defend itself and protect its people" while calling for de-escalation and restraint from both sides. NR's Michael Brendan Dougherty, marking these "strange days," also flagged the effusive praise for President Trump's handling of Iran from NATO's secretary-general.
We can infer from these reactions a few things.
One, the determinations of the International Atomic Energy Agency indeed rattled the Europeans as well as the Israelis. As NR's original editorial on Israel's strikes noted, "Iran had significantly ramped up its enrichment capacity, with even the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency (not exactly friendly to Israeli militarism) having determined that Iran had been enriching uranium well beyond the level of civilian use, and closer to military grade."
Two, Iran's support for Russia in its war against Ukraine — via cooperation on the production of attack drones for use on the battlefield — has won Tehran few sympathizers inside Europe’s political establishment.
Three, relatedly, Europe's well-founded fear of Iran is greater than its misgivings about Israel, given Iran's history of targeting regime opponents there. A 2024 report by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy mapped a long trail of Iranian-linked plots often using criminals as proxies, including "surveillance of Jews and Jewish businesses in Paris, Munich, and Berlin," as well as a foiled 2018 attack outside Paris (an interactive map of the data can be found here). The report tracked 102 plots in Europe since 1979 — everything from assassinations to abductions — with activity picking up in recent years:
The pace of Iranian operational activity in Europe has spiked, with over half of these plots (54 cases) occurring between 2021 and 2024. These operations have focused on targeting Iranian dissidents (34 cases), including journalists broadcasting news in Farsi that Tehran would rather not see the light of day, Israeli citizens and diplomats (10 cases), and Jews (7 cases).
Of course, the opinions among European officials on this month's strikes against Iran are far from unanimous. There was grumbling inside the EU, including concerns about chaos in Iran potentially leading to another migration wave. And at the United Nations, it's business as usual where the Middle East is concerned. Jimmy Quinn reports:
In the aftermath of U.S. strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities this weekend, U.N. leaders put their long-running anti-U.S. bias on display.
"I am gravely alarmed by the use of force by the United States against Iran today. This is a dangerous escalation in a region already on the edge — and a direct threat to international peace and security," U.N. secretary general António Guterres wrote in a post on X Saturday night. He added that "member states" should "de-escalate" and abide by their obligations under international law, though he seemed to be referring primarily to the U.S. and Israel. The U.N.'s top human rights official, Volker Türk, echoed Guterres's remarks and said that he is "deeply concerned" by President Trump's strikes.
That the surgical U.S. targeting of a handful of nuclear sites rose to the level of a direct, public rebuke by Guterres makes for a glaring double standard, considering the patently belligerent and unlawful behavior he has overlooked from Beijing.
But Israel, and America, can't expect the impossible. That top European leaders have mostly sided with their cause in this operation is another victory the Israelis can pocket from the "twelve-day war," provided the cease-fire holds — and new tensions don't cause Israel's Western supporters to reconsider.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
On the strikes: The Strikes on Iran Made the World Safer
On a (hopefully) renewed alliance: Trump's NATO Win
On the primary: New York Chooses Its Fate
On the anniversary: Dobbs Transformed America
ARTICLES
Audrey Fahlberg: Exclusive: How Iranian Threats Against Donald Trump Rattled His 2024 Campaign
Rich Lowry: President Badass
Andrew McCarthy: What About Iran's Bushehr Nuclear Reactor?
Charles C. W. Cooke: There Is No Trumpism
Charles C. W. Cooke: New Yorkers Know How to Fix Their City and Have Chosen Not To
Jeffrey Blehar: Andrew Cuomo's Final Humiliation
John Puri: Zohran Mamdani Will Make New York's Housing Crisis Even Worse
James Lynch: Supreme Court Limits Nationwide Injunctions in Win for Trump Admin, Punts on Birthright Citizenship
Haley Strack: Supreme Court Rules in Favor of Maryland Parents in Challenge to Mandatory LGBTQ Curriculum
Noah Rothman: Who Is This Guy?
Moira Gleason: DEI Is Out at the Smithsonian. Now Comes the Hard Part
Ramesh Ponnuru: What Government Can and Can't Do About Birth Rates
Dan McLaughlin: Justice Jackson's Misguided Attack on Written Law
Brittany Bernstein: U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli Is Reminding Californians They're Not Exempt from Federal Law
Becket Adams: The Media's Stubbornly Skewed Coverage of the Trans 'Treatment' Debate
Dominic Pino: Power-Hungry and Petty: How Shawn Fain Runs the UAW
Abigail Anthony: As Pride-Month Enthusiasm Wanes, Fidelity Month Gains Traction
CAPITAL MATTERS
On regulation, going with your gut can be ill-advised. From Iain Murray: The Cost of 'Common Sense'
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Brian Allen gets an early start on Fourth celebrations: Art About Love of Country Rules the Headlines
Armond White recalls where "ranked choice" found early adopters: Ranked Choice at the Movies
HALFWAY THERE. THE EXCERPTS WILL TAKE YOU HOME
Speaking of Europe and "strange days," Noah Rothman writes on Trump's changes of heart, for now:
How many times have we been told that this is a "new Trump?" Can we even count the moments when Donald Trump "became president," shedding his pugilistic affectation and everyman demeanor for the deportment of a statesman? Those moments abound, just barely keeping pace with political observers' demand for them. And yet, there are times when Trump genuinely appears a changed man.
We're experiencing one of those moments. In the aftermath of the strikes Donald Trump ordered on Iran's nuclear facilities, he has emerged as Scrooge from the sleepless torment to which Dickens's apparitions consigned him — his heart overflowing altruism, Trump has thrown open the shutters to bask in the adoration of the grateful, promising the streets below more charity to come.
The president appeared buoyant as he emerged from Air Force One. He beamed for the cameras before ceremonially donning a baseball cap. For the occasion, he eschewed the traditional red "MAGA" hat in favor of a white, fitted cap that read only "USA." Jauntily, he stepped onto Dutch soil, where NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte greeted him. Later, the two proceeded to a summit of NATO nations at The Hague, where the president effused goodwill toward America's allies.
"As far as Article Five," the president said of NATO's bedrock mutual defense provision. Trump trailed off for a moment. "Look," he eventually continued, gathering his thoughts, "when I came here, I came here because it was something I'm supposed to be doing, but I left here a little bit differently."
"I left here saying that these people really love their countries," he said of his European counterparts. "It's not a rip-off, and we're here to help them protect their country."
What a change of heart. Donald Trump has declared the NATO alliance's security guarantees a scam so often that it has become a central tenet of the MAGA faith. What revelation has so shaken this central feature of Trump's political persona? The nearest equivalent may be Ronald Reagan's 1988 admission to reporters in Red Square that the Soviet Union was no longer the "Evil Empire" he had for so long assessed it to be. A sea change was upon us then. One may be upon us now.
Charles C. W. Cooke is baffled by New York's rank choices:
I did not think that Democratic primary voters in New York City would choose a socialist to be their mayoral nominee, even if his most competitive rival was the egregious Andrew Cuomo. I was wrong. Last night, New York's illustrious Democrats selected the thoroughly absurd Zohran Mamdani to be their standard-bearer in November — and, by the looks of it, the contest was not particularly close. In its write-up this morning, Politico proposes that Mamdani's victory represents a "clear repudiation of the political establishment" and may even "have reordered the Big Apple's electoral politics." In an admirable understatement, the outlet concludes that, despite his victory, "questions persist for Mamdani."
As it happens, I don't have questions for Mamdani. I have questions for New York's electorate. And one, in particular, springs to mind: What, in the name of all that is holy, are you doing?
I do not ask this because I am a conservative. Having lived in New York City, I understand that the metropolis will never have a politics that comports with my own. Nor do I ask it because I am unable to imagine that different people and different places will have different politics. In my outlook, I am a small-l liberal, and, in my preferences, I am a federalist. Florida is not Maine, and San Francisco is not Cleveland, and that's absolutely fine with me. I have strong views, yes. But, even in the areas I feel the strongest about, I can usually comprehend the opposite perspective. Presupposed by the Constitution that I cherish is that, however long the republic lasts, its people will never abolish their heartfelt ideological divisions.
But, in the case of New York City, I am baffled. Why? Well, because, in my experience, most of the important questions that arise in that place are pre-political. My reading of history shows that, if New York is to function properly, it needs a pragmatic, no-frills mayor who is obsessed with fighting crime, with ensuring that the city's already high taxes do not become so absurd that the taxpayers leave, and with preventing the machinery of government from being derailed by special interests. When New York has one of those mayors — as it did in Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg — it works. When New York does not have one of those mayors — as was the case in the 1970s and 1980s, and, as has been the case (to a far lesser extent) since 2014 — it works less well. Politics is a complicated endeavor, and, in consequence, it does not exhibit too many genuine "iron rules." But this is one of them: Serious person as mayor = success. Frivolous person as mayor = failure.
Audrey Fahlberg has new details about the Iran-linked threats to Trump's campaign before the 2024 election:
In 2022, Donald Trump's political team weighed traveling to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Budapest, Hungary.
But as the president's top political aide Susie Wiles explained to multiple people later in the campaign, Trump did not end up attending the conservative confab in person because senior aides believed the Secret Service couldn't keep him safe from the threat of Iranian retaliation for the assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander killed in a Trump-ordered U.S. airstrike in 2020. Rather than risk serious security lapses on this overseas trip, Trump's team played it safe. He greeted conference attendees via video-message instead.
Later in the campaign — after the failed assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pa., which involved drone surveillance — two suspicious men were spotted flying a drone over the campaign's West Palm Beach headquarters. While the men were never apprehended and their motive is still unknown, senior campaign staff suspected they may have been part of an Iranian murder-for-hire plot, which shows how seriously those closest to Trump took the threat of retaliation from Tehran.
These previously unreported details illustrate the serious threat Tehran posed to the president's security apparatus before and during Trump's 2024 campaign, and demonstrate how concerned his inner circle was about his security after he left office in 2021. Those concerns were prescient, considering the threats later metastasized into a successful Iranian hack-and-leak operation on the campaign and a foiled murder-for-hire plot against the president.
That Iran has posed an active threat to the president for years carries geopolitical significance five months into Trump's second term, as he weighs his next move in the Middle East days after ordering B-2 stealth bombers to strike multiple nuclear facilities in Iran on Saturday. Those strikes followed targeted Israeli strikes on Iran last week and prompted Tehran to launch retaliatory rocket attacks on U.S. bases in Qatar and Iraq on Monday. According to news reports, the U.S. military successfully intercepted those rockets and there were no casualties; Trump has since signaled an interest in de-escalating and announced a cease-fire.
Those who have worked for the president for years speculate that the regime's assassination plots against him hardened his resolve against Iran.
Brittany Bernstein interviewed the top federal prosecutor dealing with California's mayhem-makers:
Bill Essayli, the new U.S. attorney for California's central district, needs residents of the Golden State to understand that California is not exempt from complying with federal law.
Democratic politicians have convinced Californians that the state is a "real sanctuary" from federal policies they dislike. That misguided attitude, Essayli told National Review in a recent interview, explains the chaos that has broken out in his first two months on the job.
As immigration-enforcement raids began in Los Angeles earlier this month, rioters took to the streets, setting fire to cars, injuring law enforcement officers, blocking the 101 Freeway, and damaging government vehicles.
"You're seeing what I call a public temper tantrum because they conditioned people to believe over the last few years that California is special or really is exempt from federal law. It's not," says Essayli, the son of Lebanese immigrants who came to the U.S. legally.
He said the public reaction makes it "more challenging" for federal law enforcement to do its job, but not impossible.
"We are still going out and doing our enforcement operations. We have not stopped, we will not be deterred, and the only thing that's going to happen is you're going to see more resources come to our district to make sure we can successfully complete that mission."
"If they don't like the number of National Guard that are here now, they should see how many we get if this continues," he warned.
CODA
I'm arriving late to the Brian Wilson tributes. And I'll admit I never caught the Beach Boys bug, so I'm not the best person to be waxing rhapsodic on the band. But I'm a sucker for an instrumental, so I'll throw out there the song "Pet Sounds," which, for my money, succinctly captured the whole vibe of the Pet Sounds album, without a word spoken.
Hope you've been able to escape the heat. Catch you next week, and thanks for reading.
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