Dear Weekend Jolter,
I share Jeff Blehar's hesitation in making any bold pronouncements about Iran. My only presumption is that history will eventually record one of three outcomes: The Trump administration, together with Israeli and Arab Gulf partners, toppled the oppressive theocracy and allowed the Iranian people to take their country back; the regime's surviving elements withstood the bombardment and put down domestic opposition, reasserting control under new leadership (possibly with tacit U.S. acceptance, Venezuela-style); or the headless nation then descended into a prolonged and terrible period of internal strife.
Only the first of those outcomes would be deemed a complete success in light of President Trump's call to action to the Iranian people last Saturday (though the U.S.-Israeli operation has had plenty of success obliterating Iranian targets). For it to come to fruition, a whole lot still needs to go right, beyond the elimination of the ayatollah and other regime figures to date.
"Hoping for the best, preparing for the worst" is Jim Geraghty's mantra and, I suspect, that of many of us. He notes that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is estimated to have between "150,000 and 190,000 personnel" and that members of the IRGC, "effectively a state within a state," will probably "recognize that this is now a fight to the death."
That means regime change depends on a viable, sane, likely well-armed faction being able to assert control inside Iran and ideally transition to at least a less-repressive form of government. The Washington Post reported Thursday that the administration has started reaching out to Kurdish leaders in Iran and Iraq, offering U.S. air cover and other support for them to take over portions of the country. It remains to be seen whether other opposition elements — currently fractured and, in some cases, imprisoned — might join in.
Jianli Yang, a China democracy advocate and Tiananmen survivor, writes in depth about the path forward and reckons that four conditions have to be met for "perhaps the least likely outcome of a bombing campaign" — democracy — to become reality:
First, there must be broad and deep dissatisfaction with the existing political order, accompanied by a clear demand for change. Second, a viable democratic opposition must arise from that dissatisfaction. Third, a visible rift must open within the ruling establishment — among elites, institutions, or the security apparatus. Fourth, there must be meaningful international support grounded in liberal values and strategic calculation, based on a belief that the democratic alternative is credible.
Whereas the first and fourth conditions are at least partly satisfied with Iran, the second and third are not. As Jianli writes, the opposition is not unified, armed, or organized. And an open split in the regime has not yet materialized: "Authoritarian systems rarely fall simply because crowds gather. They falter when loyalty fractures. The task, therefore, is to make defection conceivable and repression costly." Absent such conditions, he writes, "state fragmentation or consolidation of power by the IRGC" are more likely than liberal democracy if the clerical system collapses.
Apart from underscoring the influence of the IRGC, Jim explains the complications with various elements of the opposition, including that the figure best known to Americans, Reza Pahlavi, hasn't been able to visit Iran since he was a teenager.
There also is the matter of weapons. "If we are setting the regime up for a death blow, but refuse to deliver it ourselves — who will?" Dan McLaughlin asks. Bing West puts it bluntly: "If not supplied with arms, the people lose." (The Kurds, again, reportedly are part of this discussion, though there are doubts about how successful they could be.)
The memory of Iraq, naturally, looms over another regime-change war in the Middle East. Phil Klein argues that we shouldn't assume history repeats in that sense — not just because Trump is unlikely to approve a major ground invasion, but because, in this war, our forces wouldn't have to worry about Iran meddling as it did in Iraq.
Lessons from the first Iraq war, however, might be more applicable. In his video announcing the strikes last weekend, Trump urged the Iranian people to stay sheltered while the bombing is ongoing — then "take over your government." This approach did not work in Iraq in 1991, when Saddam Hussein mowed down thousands of Iraqis who took up George H. W. Bush's call "to take matters into their own hands" and force out the dictator.
Then again, Saddam Hussein was still living and leading Iraq after the American military offensive. Khamenei is dead. The precedents of air campaigns creating conditions for regime change are not favorable, but the U.S.-Israeli campaign is unprecedented in so many respects that those listening for historical rhymes in Persia might find a new verse entirely.
Elliott Abrams, with the last words:
Even if the regime hangs on, its pretense to be the dominant regional power — with a huge ballistic missile array and a nuclear weapons program — will have been shattered. While we cannot predict the date of its collapse, whether that takes weeks, months, or years, that collapse has been brought closer.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
We can't say we're surprised: Noem Out
Jihadist violence returns: Terror in Austin
It's not too late: The GOP Can Still Avoid Shooting Itself in the Foot in Texas
On the ayatollah: Death Comes to Khamenei
ARTICLES
Zineb Riboua: Why Operation Epic Fury Is Catastrophic for Xi
Andrew McCarthy: The British Government's Iran Dilemma
Philip Klein: No, Marco Rubio Didn't Claim That Israel Dragged Trump into War with Iran
Rich Lowry: The Age of Missile Defense
Brittany Bernstein: Iran's 'Avuncular and Magnanimous' Supreme Leader
John Yoo: Congress Had Plenty of Opportunities to Stop the Iran Strikes
Mark Dubowitz: Over Iran, U.S. and Israeli Aircraft Fly as Equals
Jeffrey Blehar: A Bad Night in Texas for the GOP's Future
Audrey Fahlberg: Exclusive: Trump Considering Mullin as Replacement for Noem, Privately Furious over Senate Testimony
Audrey Fahlberg: Trump Taps Senator Markwayne Mullin to Replace Kristi Noem as DHS Secretary
Elizabeth Mirabelli & Lori Ann West: California Told Us to Deceive Parents, but We Said No
Kamden Mulder: Virginia Governor Refuses to Help ICE Deport Stabbing Suspect Without Warrant
Charles C. W. Cooke: What the Founders' Drinking Habits Have to Do with Gun Rights
James Lileks: Europe in One Structure
Neal B. Freeman: Mission Accomplished. For Now
CAPITAL MATTERS
Phillip W. Magness & Marc Wheat, with another tariffs fact-check: No, Mr. President, Section 122 Tariffs Won't Work Either
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Brian Allen has a well-timed profile of an artist inspired by Persian-style calligraphy: Old Persian Calligraphy Survives in All Its Elegance, in an Unlikely Place
"Is this disastrous waste of talent and imagination the best that Millennial Hollywood can do?" asks Armond White: Ella McCay — Hollywood's Definitive Disaster
THESE EXCERPTS ARE MADE FOR READIN'
Hudson's Zineb Riboua unpacks the implications of the Iran war for China:
Operation Epic Fury, the U.S.–Israeli military campaign now dismantling Iran's military architecture, has produced something unusual in the corridors of Chinese power: visible confusion.
Xi Jinping is scrambling — and that word is not used lightly. For a leader who has built his image on strategic composure and long-horizon thinking, Xi faces an acutely dangerous moment — not because China faces a direct military threat but because every available response to the crisis in the Persian Gulf leads Beijing into a trap of its own contradictions.
There are three reasons why these strikes have created big problems for China. First, the Iranian counterweight is gone. In 2021, Xi told senior party officials that "the East is rising and the West is declining," that America was "the biggest source of chaos in the present-day world," and that China was entering a period of strategic opportunity. Iran was central to that thesis. Beijing needed a defiant Tehran to keep Washington pinned down in the Gulf, to sustain a sanctions-proof energy corridor, and above all, to stand as living evidence that American power had hard limits. The entire architecture of the CCP's dogma of inevitability rested on Iran's ability to endure, and Epic Fury removed the foundation in a single afternoon.
Ayatollah Khamenei was the man who made that thesis feel real. Beijing's relationship with the Islamic Republic was never really ideological, but Khamenei's survival was the single most useful fact in Chinese foreign policy. Here was a man whom Washington had threatened, sanctioned, plotted against, and encircled for over four decades, and yet he was still giving Friday sermons. Xi personally signed the comprehensive strategic partnership with Khamenei's government. He personally authorized the weapons transfers. And he personally wielded the U.N. Security Council veto. None of it kept Khamenei alive for one additional hour once Washington decided he was finished.
Second, Xi's own story is collapsing from the inside. The story he told 1.4 billion people — that America is a declining power incapable of decisive force projection — does not match what happened in mere hours over Tehran. State media can suppress the footage, and the censors can scrub Weibo, but the ones who matter most — the military planners, the foreign policy professionals, the provincial officials who read between the lines for a living — know what they saw. And if the story is wrong about Iran, the unavoidable next question is whether it was ever right about anything else.
Third, the energy math is turning against Beijing. China bought 1.38 million barrels per day of Iranian oil last year and takes over 80 percent of everything Iran ships. Half of China's total oil imports pass through the Strait of Hormuz. With Khamenei now dead and Iran's military leadership weakened, the Gulf's strategic balance shifts decisively toward Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, whose energy ties with the United States are strengthening. China's old selling point was very simple and transactional: We buy your oil and never mention human rights. That pitch loses its utility when Gulf producers already feel protected by an American security guarantee that just proved, on live television, that it works.
Brittany Bernstein raises an eyebrow at some of the ayatollah obits:
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was many things — religious zealot, brutal dictator, lifelong enemy of the United States — but, as the New York Times and Washington Post emphasized in their obituaries of the late Iranian supreme leader, he went out of his way to appear "avuncular" and "magnanimous."
Did anyone — other than credulous Westerners — buy the act?
The Washington Post would have you believe that the people of Iran did. The Post's editors chose to feature a photo of a woman mourning Khamenei's death on their front page, creating the impression that he was a much beloved leader.
Khamenei was responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians — both in his own country and around the world — over the course of his more than three decades in power.
In recent months alone, he ordered the killing of an untold number of anti-government protesters. (Humanitarian groups fear the death toll could be in the tens of thousands.) Reports indicate as many as 1.5 million people took to the streets in Tehran to protest the regime on a single day in January. And a survey taken by the Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran in June 2024, long before the collapse of the country's currency or the widespread protesting in the streets, found a majority of Iranians opposed the Islamic Republic and supported changing or transforming the political system. Only 20 percent of respondents wanted the Islamic Republic to remain in power, according to the survey taken by the independent research group based in the Netherlands.
Audrey Fahlberg called it on this week’s DHS shake-up. Here’s her original scoop, before the announcement:
President Donald Trump is privately furious with Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for suggesting in her Senate Judiciary Committee testimony on Tuesday that he gave advance approval of a taxpayer-funded $220 million ad campaign contract that was subcontracted to one of her allies, National Review has learned.
The president is frustrated that the embattled cabinet secretary repeatedly suggested under oath that the president was aware of the multi-million-dollar ad campaign — which featured Noem prominently — and approved its release before the agency greenlit the contract, according to a source familiar with the president's thinking.
"The president approved ahead of time you spending $220 million running TV ads across the country in which you are featured prominently?" Republican Senator John Kennedy asked Noem during Tuesday's hearing.
"Yes sir, we went through the legal processes—" Noem said.
"Did the president know you were gonna do this?" Kennedy interjected.
Noem answered again in the affirmative multiple times. "I'm not saying you're not telling the truth. It's just hard for me to believe, knowing the president, as I do, that you said, 'Mr. President, here's some ads I've cut, and I'm going to spend $220 million running them,' that he would have agreed to that," Kennedy said. "I don't think Russ Vought" at the Office of Management and Budget "would have agreed to that," he added.
These frustrations have prompted the president to privately express his openness to replacing her, according to a person familiar with the matter. One name he has begun floating this week as a potential replacement: Oklahoma's junior U.S. Senator Markwayne Mullin.
Elizabeth Mirabelli & Lori Ann West, lead plaintiffs in a big gender-related case in the headlines, Mirabelli v. Bonta, write about their fight with California:
Between us, we spent more than five decades teaching in California public schools. We both won Teacher of the Year awards. We coached teams, mentored struggling students, and built the kind of trust with families that only comes from showing up year after year. We didn't enter education to become plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit. We entered it because we believed in children and in the partnership between schools and parents.
Then California told us to start lying to those parents.
Under policies enforced by Governor Gavin Newsom and Attorney General Rob Bonta, California schools were required to conceal a child's asserted gender identity from parents, even when a student was living as a different gender at school with a new name and pronouns. These policies apply to children as young as two. We were told to participate or face consequences. As educators, and as women of faith, we couldn't comply.
So we sued. In December 2025, Judge Roger Benitez of the Southern District of California ruled that the state's parental exclusion policies are unconstitutional. He found that schools cannot hide a child's social gender transition from that child's own parents and that teachers who want to share such information cannot be prohibited from doing so.
Consider what those policies did to real families. One family in our case discovered that their daughter's school had been secretly transitioning her and treating her as a boy since the start of seventh grade. For 13 months, her mental health deteriorated while her parents knew nothing. She attempted suicide. Her parents learned the truth not from any teacher or counselor, but from doctors at a hospital. Even after this tragedy, school administrators continued to withhold information about their daughter's gender identification, citing California law.
The daughter in another family was secretly transitioned beginning in fifth grade. Her parents found out only because another mother let the secret slip. When they confronted the principal, they were told that state law prohibited sharing information about a child's gender identity without the child's consent.
California defended its approach by claiming that it protects students. But after more than two years of litigation and full discovery, the state could not produce a single piece of admissible evidence that parental involvement causes harm.
CODA
I think the most appropriate thing to post here right now is a link to something approximating ocean sounds, or a calming breeze, or just white noise. Or, in the same vein, to this album opener by Aphex Twin.
Carry on. See you next weekend.
Commentaires
Enregistrer un commentaire
Thank you to leave a comment on my site