Why Khamenei Is Dead

By Graeme Wood

Sunday, March 01, 2026

 

Celebrating or calling for the deaths of others is wrong, and bad for the soul. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who was killed yesterday by Israel, did so just about every time he spoke in public for 37 years. He handed out Death to Americas and Death to Israels the way other people would say Yo! or How you doin’? The one time I saw him in person, at Friday prayer at Tehran University in 2004, he ended his sermon with these chants and then drove off literally seconds later in the back of an armored sedan, passing so close to me that I could see his car had recently been waxed. Many, many Iranians, as well as Syrians, Iraqis, Lebanese, and Ukrainians, wish Khamenei could be brought back to life for just one minute, so they could give him the finger, or maybe the whole fist. I missed my chance.

 

He was the enemy of many. But he was also an enemy to himself, one of the Iranian regime’s points of vulnerability. During the past two years of conflict with Israel and the United States, Iran experienced a total failure of leadership. It has not experienced failure in every domain. The regime’s missiles partially deterred Israel. Its institutions held fast and didn’t collapse. No units of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have defected. But the leadership—that is, Khamenei and his tight circle of loyalists—have performed shambolically.

 

Khamenei negotiated with President Trump in a way that suggested he knew nothing of the current president’s vanity, or contempt for multilateralism. Khamenei and his close advisers behaved, as Robert Conquest used to say, as if controlled secretly by their enemies. They made blunders, such as the decision to sit in a room together for a secret meeting, where they could conveniently be killed in one go, and in the first hours of the war, by an Israeli bombing raid. Israel and the U.S. somehow knew where everyone was, as if they had a listening device implanted in Khamenei’s hearing aid, and trackers installed in the Fitbits, Apple Watches, and artificial pacemakers of every member of the Iranian high command. This intelligence achievement was not only technological—the penetration of devices. It speaks to the basic failure of the Islamic Republic, and of Khamenei himself, to provide a state worth fighting for, rather than selling everyone out. Someone must have been squealing. Khamenei probably appointed the people who betrayed him, and they did so in large part because the regime he represented deserved betrayal.

 

Jaber Rajabi, whom I interviewed before the war, was one such true believer in the Islamic Republic who betrayed it after he smelled the rot. He was naive enough to believe that he could fix the rot by reporting it directly to the supreme leader. Instead he was swatted away, he told me. And if you imagine the small failure of command that Khamenei’s response represented—and then remember that there are probably many others like it—the infiltration of Iran’s top leadership will be less mysterious.

 

Rajabi had, by 2015, come to doubt Iran’s policies in Iraq. He had been part of Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, and he said he fought on their side because he favored the establishment of a Shiite theocracy that resembled the one in Iran. He was perplexed to find that goal not supported but in fact thwarted repeatedly by Iran. Iran wanted Iraq to remain weak and submissive, and in the meantime, corrupt Iranian officials could suck its resources, profit personally, and leave the country an impoverished mess.

 

Rajabi did not rise up through the normal means—and that meant that he lacked some of the backroom knife-fighting skills that distinguish other, more bureaucratic types. He therefore approached the issue frontally. “I decided to take my proof of these activities directly to the supreme leader,” Rajabi told me. (At this point I am obliged to note that the story he told me is impossible to verify, but certain details make me think it is nonetheless true.)

 

His previous acquaintance with Khamenei had been in passing only: He knew Khamenei’s son Mojtaba because they periodically went to Qom together for religious study, and the supreme leader knew him, if at all, as one of his son’s friends. Rajabi was therefore reduced to meeting Khamenei by ambushing him after evening prayers in his compound. Jaber says he brought a dossier of incriminating documents. In the receiving line after prayers, the supreme leader first addressed Rajabi by the wrong name (“Jabri”). After this inauspicious beginning, Rajabi handed over the dossier. “I was shaking,” Rajabi said. “I was so nervous.”

 

What happened next is predictable to students of the dynamics of authoritarian rule. If you are supreme leader, admission that corruption exists is a sign of incompetence, because you are responsible for everything. There is, moreover, always incentive to promote incompetents, because competent people eventually might get competent at removing you. The incentives all work against the repair of broken systems and against efficient management of hiring and promotion.

 

Khamenei was known to be displeased when asked to referee disagreements between subordinates. He rapidly scanned the document’s executive summary, Rajabi said. “Normally if you hand him something, he hands it to his assistant.” This time he kept the document to himself, and tucked it under his leg. That was the whole interaction. Within weeks, an acquaintance in Iraq told Rajabi that Qassem Suleimani, the commander of the Quds Force and the most powerful general in Iran, had heard about the document and wanted Rajabi dead. Over the next few years, Rajabi told me, he suffered multiple assassination attempts, the last of them a poisoning that nearly succeeded.

 

Well, that’s one way to manage down. No one familiar with the Islamic Republic will be surprised that the whole system was riddled with people who believed in nothing but their own enrichment and survival, and who achieved their exalted positions through mediocrity. Iran’s leadership was a soft target.

 

The ironic twist in this tale of human resources gone awry is that Khamenei was himself a talented leader in other ways. He looked at first like a nonentity, a caretaker to stand in for his much more charismatic and religiously accomplished predecessor. Instead he outlasted almost every dictator of his generation, and he created a network of proxies so ferocious that no enemy of Iran dared disturb it, until Israel decided it had no choice. He fended off challenges, including popular uprisings, in part because he came to power in a popular uprising of his own and knew instinctively how to neutralize them. And now he’s dead, and all of those accomplishments are crashing down, because the best-planned defenses don’t count for much if the people you trust to run them are ready to sell you out.

The Death of Khamenei and the End of an Era

By Karim Sadjadpour

Saturday, February 28, 2026

 

“The essence of oligarchical rule,” George Orwell wrote in 1984, “is the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living.” For nearly four decades, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei presided over exactly that. He did not build the Islamic Republic of Iran. He inherited it from its founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who in 1979 led a revolution that deposed a U.S.-aligned monarchy and replaced it with an Islamist theocracy whose three ideological pillars were “Death to America,” “Death to Israel,” and the mandatory covering of  women—the hijab, he said, was “the flag of the revolution.”

 

Khomeini died in 1989, and his successor’s life’s work was to keep that revolution alive long after the society it governed had moved on. In this, Khamenei was remarkably, ruthlessly successful. But the worldview he imposed was never truly his own. He was the spokesman for a ghost.

 

Khamenei’s death by the hand of a nation he worked very hard to kill is a hinge moment in the history of the 47-year-old revolution. He was the last of the regime’s first-generation founders.

 

Khamenei’s rise was engineered not by destiny but by maneuver. In 1989, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the shrewd speaker of Parliament and the son of a pistachio merchant, helped anoint Khamenei as supreme leader by claiming that it was Khomeini’s dying wish. Rafsanjani likely believed that he was working to install a pliant figurehead. Khamenei—the son of a poor cleric from the shrine city of Mashhad—had other ideas.

 

The rivalry between them endured for three decades. Rafsanjani favored wealth creation and détente with the United States; Khamenei believed that compromising on revolutionary principles would hasten the regime’s collapse, just as perestroika had undone the Soviet Union. As Machiavelli warned, “He who is the cause of another becoming powerful is ruined.”

 

Khamenei’s lack of clerical legitimacy, and his general insecurity, led him to cultivate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as his praetorian force; he handpicked commanders and rotated them to prevent rivals from accumulating power. The IRGC eclipsed the clergy as Iran’s most powerful institution—politically expedient for Khamenei and financially expedient for the Guards, which became the dominant economic force in the theocracy it defended. Khamenei wielded Iran’s elected institutions as facades, allowing just enough political theater to project legitimacy. No matter what agenda the president espoused—the economic pragmatism of Rafsanjani, the liberal aspirations of Mohammad Khatami, the populist provocations of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the nuclear diplomacy of Hassan Rouhani—Khamenei emasculated him.

 

An Iranian academic, some of whose students rose to senior government positions in Tehran, once told me that at the revolution’s beginning, the regime consisted of “80 percent indoctrinated believers—largely ignorant of global realities—and 20 percent charlatans and chameleons.” By Khamenei’s final years, he said, the ratio had inverted: 20 percent believers, 80 percent opportunists who flocked around officials for wealth and privilege.

 

Khamenei’s anti-Americanism was cloaked in ideology but also driven by self-preservation. The powerful cleric Ahmad Jannati once articulated the regime’s deepest anxiety: “If pro-American tendencies come to power in Iran, we have to say goodbye to everything.” Khamenei shared this conviction absolutely. “Reconciliation between Iran and America is possible,” he once said, in a revealing formulation, “but it is not possible between the Islamic Republic and America.” The American philosopher Eric Hoffer captured this logic in his 1951 book on mass movements, The True Believer. “Hatred is the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying agents,” he wrote; mass movements “can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without belief in a devil.” America was Khamenei’s devil.

 

Khamenei understood that his power was best preserved in a bubble. Not complete isolation—he wanted to sell Iran’s oil—but calibrated insularity, walled off from the global forces of capitalism and civil society that would expose and erode the regime. He had translated the works of the radical anti-Western Egyptian thinker Sayyid Qutb into Persian during his years in the shah’s prisons; decades later, he remained in the same intellectual bunker, convinced that Western culture posed a greater threat than Western bombs.

 

But insularity has its costs, and they were borne entirely by the Iranian people. Khamenei treated the relationship between the state and its citizens not as a social contract but as a predatory lease—nonnegotiable, imposed by the landlord, long since expired. The regime micromanaged the personal lives of more than 90 million people, dictating whom they were allowed to love, what they drank, what women wore on their heads. It preached austerity while the Guards operated as a tax-exempt conglomerate. It built a digital wall around the country, blocking global platforms while regime officials posted propaganda on X. It charged protesters with “waging war against God” and maintained the world’s highest execution rate per capita. When even that was not enough to quell dissent—last month, as protests again swept the country—Khamenei ordered what may prove to be one of the deadliest episodes of state violence in modern history.

 

Khamenei confronted the paradox that every revolutionary caretaker must face: The revolution he preserved was designed for a world that no longer exists. George Kennan once wrote of the Soviet Union, “No mystical, Messianic movement can face frustration indefinitely without eventually adjusting itself in one way or another to the logic of that state of affairs.” Khamenei staved off that adjustment for nearly four decades through force of will, brutality, and the conviction that bending would mean breaking.

 

In the end, he was felled by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, an American president and an Israeli prime minister whom he loathed. He lived by “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.” He died by death from America and Israel.

Malign Regimes Keep Getting a Pass with the American Media

By Becket Adams

Sunday, March 01, 2026

 

In 2016, the Heritage Foundation posted a note on social media unfavorably contrasting then–President Barack Obama with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

 

“Vladimir Putin respects two things: strength and consistency,” it read. “In the last eight years, President Obama has shown neither.”

 

It was an intensely stupid thing to say, both in terms of the facts and the optics of a supposedly patriotic U.S.-based organization elevating an enemy of the U.S. to criticize the U.S. president.

 

I bring this up to illustrate how our national media cover foreign adversaries and hostile regimes. They often use an approach similar to Heritage’s, only to discredit Republicans instead of Democrats.

 

Just consider the wildly divergent news coverage of the 2026 Winter Olympics.

 

On the one hand, journalists idolize Eileen Gu, a woman who enjoys all the comforts and freedoms of being born and raised a U.S. citizen but competes anyway for the Chinese Communist Party. Journalists fawn over her, with glowing profiles and heroic praise, even though she’s ultimately just a well-compensated spokeswoman for a country that herds ethnic minorities into internment camps.

 

On the other hand, members of the U.S. men’s hockey team, the first to win gold since the year audiences learned Darth Vader is Luke’s father, have been vilified and smeared as misogynists, clowns, and all-around villains by the press — all because they accepted a phone call from the president during which he invited them to his State of the Union address and then joked that he would have to invite the also-victorious Olympic U.S. women’s hockey team or he’d be impeached. Some of the hockey players laughed, and some also attended Trump’s State of the Union address.

 

The men’s hockey team is also unapologetically patriotic and clearly proud of the U.S., even with Donald Trump at the helm. They haven’t adopted the sports media’s preferred political stance, which portrays the U.S. as a deeply corrupt country in need of constant flogging. So naturally, the men’s hockey team faces withering criticism from the press, while a propaganda tool of the CCP receives favorable coverage.

 

If this surprises you, it shouldn’t. This isn’t the media’s first love affair with a proxy of a malign regime, especially when they see that proxy as a repudiation of the Trump administration — and at the Winter Olympics, no less!

 

Don’t forget the sycophantic coverage the U.S. press gave to Kim Jong-un’s sister, Kim Yo Jong, at the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, because she appeared to give a disapproving look to then–Vice President Mike Pence.

 

You go, girl! Resist fascism!

 

Meanwhile, the North Korean people are starving, with some trying to survive on grass, roots, and dirt.

 

Then, of course, there’s the American press’s long-standing veneration of China. What stands out is not just that U.S. reporters often praise the brutal police state, but that they regularly shield it from criticism.

 

Recall the efforts during the Covid-19 pandemic, for which China is responsible, when American media swung between praising the CCP’s laughable claim that it had “defeated” the virus and criticizing those who suggested the pandemic might have originated from a lab in Wuhan. Some went so far as to say it was racist to promote the lab-leak theory (because the idea that the Chinese caught the virus from eating bats and pangolins in filthy wet markets was somehow the non-racist explanation).

 

Speaking of completely unbelievable claims, let’s not forget when the New York Times ran a piece declaring that the “fight against climate change” is an “effort now mostly led by China.”

 

Are we just going to ignore that China’s primary energy source is 87 percent fossil fuels or that it’s the world’s top emitter? Stop asking questions. Be quiet and read this Times op-ed written by Director of the China Climate Hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute Li Shuo, titled, “China Is the Adult in the Room on Climate Now.”

 

Perhaps the applause for unambiguously evil leaders and regimes is just an immature outburst fueled by partisan rage.

 

Then again, long before Trump, the U.S. press also adopted a sympathetic and complimentary tone toward the Soviet Union, portraying Mikhail Gorbachev as the adult in the room and President Ronald Reagan as a cowboy dotard.

 

What’s curious is that the American press now hates Russia. What has changed?

 

Perspective.

 

Whereas members of the press previously saw the Soviets as direct adversaries of Reagan, whom they didn’t exactly favor, many today genuinely believe there’s an alliance between the current White House and the Kremlin, or at least a sense of kinship. So, the current media attitude against modern Russia might not be about Russia itself. It could be about Trump. This would certainly explain the whiplash quality of coverage from a press that once spoke favorably of the Soviet Union but is now anti–Soviet Union lite.

 

If journalists didn’t believe Trump and Putin were simpatico, they probably wouldn’t care as much about the invasion of Ukraine. Just compare the media’s muted response to the invasions of Georgia and Crimea with the current outpouring of Ukrainian pride. One can’t help but wonder if they really support Ukraine or just oppose what they likely see as a MAGA-coded despot in the Kremlin.

 

Everyone knows there’s no version of reality in which a U.S.-born and trained Olympian hops overseas to compete for the Russians, and the American media treat her as the darling of the moment. We know exactly how that scenario would play out.

 

But as long as the authoritarians in question are perceived to be the enemies of their enemy — the American president — the media can be counted on to be credulous.

Trump Rolls the Iron Dice

By Eliot A. Cohen

Saturday, February 28, 2026

 

No tears should flow for the supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, or for his associated butchers in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Basij militia, and the rest of the Iranian security apparatus. The obliteration—or perhaps one should say, re-obliteration—of the Iranian nuclear program is a good thing, as is the elimination or drastic reduction of its arsenal of drones and missiles, and the weakening of its proxy forces. The overthrow of the Iranian regime is a consummation devoutly to be wished, not only for the United States but above all for the Iranian people, most of whom hate a regime that has impoverished, oppressed, and murdered them.

 

None of that, however, should diminish concern about the fecklessness of the way in which the United States has gone about launching this war. The mood was set by President Trump at Mar-a-Lago, tieless and wearing a goofy baseball hat, announcing the attacks and justifying them on mixed grounds. He accurately described the Islamic Republic’s implacable hostility to the United States and Israel since its inception, and itemized some of its many crimes. But he set the war aims very high:

 

We are going to destroy their missiles and raze their missile industry to the ground. It will be totally—again—obliterated. We are going to annihilate their navy. We’re going to ensure that the region’s terrorist proxies can no longer destabilize the region or the world and attack our forces, and no longer use their IEDs, or roadside bombs, as they are sometimes called, to so gravely wound and kill thousands and thousands of people, including many Americans. And we will ensure that Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon.

 

And then he addressed those whose country he was attacking:

 

Finally, to the great, proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand. Stay sheltered. Don’t leave your home. It’s very dangerous outside. Bombs will be dropping everywhere. When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be, probably, your only chance for generations. For many years, you have asked for America’s help, but you never got it. No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight. Now you have a president who is giving you what you want. So let’s see how you respond. America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force. Now is the time to seize control of your destiny and to unleash the prosperous and glorious future that is close within your reach. This is the moment for action. Do not let it pass.

 

The objectives, then, are total: the utter destruction not only of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear potential, not only of vital elements of its armed forces and its proxies, but of the regime itself.

 

Any normal president launching a war with such aims against a country of some 90 million people; with an area roughly that of France, Germany, Spain, and Italy combined; with a GDP (in nominal terms) of $400 billion; and that has close relationships with Russia and China would probably have doffed the baseball cap, put on a tie, and delivered a somber speech from behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.

 

More important, a serious president would have prepared over months the ground for such a war—including by discussing the Iranian challenge at length during the State of the Union. He would have tried to explain to the American people why this, rather than their economic problems, was a matter of top urgency. He would have avoided unnecessarily antagonizing, let alone mocking and baiting, the opposition party, which is likely to control at least one house of Congress after the midterms. He would have worked on unifying support within his own base, which is internally divided among isolationists, Israel haters (who will react badly to this), and old-line Republicans who are queasy about wars launched without congressional sanction. Trump did none of these things.

 

It would be comic if it were not so serious that at the same time that the United States embarks on this kind of war, the secretary of defense is reveling in a vendetta that will pull senior U.S. officers out of educational fellowships at the country’s top universities and think tanks, and is musing about instead sending them to Liberty University and Hillsdale College—and, worse yet, picking an unnecessary fight to the death with the most effective artificial-intelligence company in the country, Anthropic.

 

How will the war unfold? Conceivably, it could work. The air attacks are probably coordinated with more sophisticated clandestine and special operations by both the U.S. and Israel. Perhaps an opportunity will indeed open up for the regime’s overthrow, either by a mass revolt or a coup by a hitherto-unknown insider or military figure willing to break with the regime’s past.

 

Or not. The regime has planned for this kind of event and, deeply unpopular though it is, has millions of adherents who are either complicit in its crimes or beneficiaries of its largesse. They, not the masses, are the ones with the guns.

 

Trump has created a substantial moral hazard for the United States of a kind not seen since the Hungarian Revolution, in 1956. By encouraging the Iranian people to rise up against a regime that was willing to openly massacre them in the thousands or tens of thousands, it has incurred a profound obligation to see them through this. If such uprisings are attempted and fail, the blood guilt will be American, incurring even more damage to America’s credibility, reputation, and honor than has already been suffered.

 

All wars have ripple effects beyond those who are engaging in them. For the moment, it appears that Iran’s proxies in Lebanon and Yemen are lying low—well and good if they continue to do so. If not, war will spread in the Middle East. Thus far, Russia and China have been impotent bystanders. Israel took apart Iran’s Russia-supplied air-defense system last year, and it is only recently that there has been talk of more advanced weapons from China going to Tehran. Something that looks like an American and Israeli success weakens them in the region as well.

 

The war will scramble politics in the Middle East as various players jockey for power in the vacuum resulting from the drastic weakening or collapse of the Iranian regime, and that process may not be particularly peaceful. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and Israel, for starters, will all seek to carve out increasing influence. And all will look to the United States to deal with the smoldering fires that may be left by an Iranian regime that, even if drastically weakened, will continue to lash out.

 

Perhaps there is a master plan for the day after—not an American or an Israeli strong suit in recent times—in some vault in the Pentagon or the Kirya. Conceivably, Trump is prepared to stay the course and come to the aid of the Iranian people whom he has incited to rise up. One may hope (but should not expect) that there are enough precision missiles and interceptors in Israeli and U.S. arsenals to let this war roll on for weeks or longer, and that there are plans for refilling empty bins after some intense fighting. Maybe the American people will rally to support a war that a few days earlier barely one in five favored. With such uncertainties, however, a queasy doubt that Trump knows what he is doing is entirely in order.

 

 

Death Comes to Khamenei

National Review Online

Sunday, March 01, 2026

 

From its inception, the Islamic Republic of Iran’s very identity has been based on a commitment to push Israel into the Mediterranean Sea and see the “Great Satan,” the United States of America, brought low. “Death to Israel,” Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, routinely shouted in a stale call-and-response to the captive Iranian people. “Death to America.”

 

Well, death has finally come for Khamenei. The despot at the top of Iran’s clerical hierarchy since 1989 met his fate at the hands of the nations that he devoted his life to destroying. But Khamenei is hardly alone.

 

According to Fox News’ Jennifer Griffin’s Pentagon sources, over 40 senior Iranian security and regime figures were killed in the opening sorties of the war in the early morning hours on Saturday. Khamenei is joined in the afterlife by, at least, his defense minister, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and several senior justice, intelligence, and counterterrorism officials.

 

We should not forget the Americans who were the victims of Khamenei’s terror.

 

Figures close to Khamenei himself bragged about the future supreme leader’s role in the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, which killed 241 U.S. service personnel. Along with members of Iran’s senior leadership, Khamenei was directly implicated in the 1996 murder of 19 Americans at the Khobar Towers complex in Saudi Arabia. In 2019, the Pentagon revised its estimate of the number of Americans killed as a direct result of the Iranian regime’s material support for insurgents in Iraq upward to 603.

 

When the Iranian regime under Khamenei wasn’t murdering American troops, attempting to assassinate foreign dignitaries on U.S. soil, and putting into motion plots to murder American public servants, including President Trump, his thugs were ruthlessly subjugating the Iranian people. According to President Trump, Khamenei’s thugs killed another 32,000 innocents in his final, desperate struggle to retain power. At long last, Khamenei can take no more lives.

 

There are many legitimate concerns about what kind of government the Iranian people will choose for themselves if the Iranian regime falls. The Iranian people have been spilling into the streets, celebrating the death of their longtime clerical oppressor. But there are early indications that the Islamic Republic’s disorganized security services are engaging once again in combat against anti-regime protesters.

 

We can’t know how this will play out; we do know that under Khamenei’s rule, Iran transformed itself into the world’s foremost exporter of Islamist terrorism. Khamenei was the terror master. Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu delivered him to justice, and they deserve the world’s gratitude.

Iran Chose the Hard Way

National Review Online

Saturday, February 28, 2026

 

Well, it’s going to be the hard way.

 

President Trump likes to tell adversaries of the United States that we can do it the easy way or the hard way, and Iran, for the second time in a year, is finding out what’s entailed in the latter.

 

In the wee hours of Saturday morning, Trump announced the start of a massive military campaign. The strikes have been conducted jointly with Israel, representing an unprecedented level of cooperation between the two allies.

 

In a combined air and sea attack, the U.S.–Israeli strikes hit anti-aircraft capabilities, ballistic missile sites, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities, and top leadership, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who in an early stunning success was killed in the raid, according to Trump and Israeli officials.

 

In a video statement released early this morning, Trump explained that since the radical Islamic regime seized power in 1979, it has been a destabilizing force in the region and a leading sponsor of terrorism that has been responsible for countless deaths of Americans, including servicemembers killed in roadside bombings in Iraq. Trump reiterated that he was committed to ensuring that Iran does not have a nuclear weapon, but negotiations made it clear that its leaders were never going to abandon their pursuit. Thus, he said, military action was the only course remaining.

 

Trump made the case for regime change, but he said ultimately it would be up to the Iranian people themselves. “When we are finished, take over your government,” he told them. “It will be yours to take. This will be, probably, your only chance for generations. For many years, you have asked for America’s help, but you never got it. No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight. Now you have a president who is giving you what you want. So let’s see how you respond.”

 

In what looks to be an early miscalculation, Iran aimed at U.S. assets in the Arab Gulf states. An Iranian drone hit a high-rise building in Bahrain, and another one hit the Kuwait International Airport. Other strikes included sites in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Jordan. As a result of these actions, Saudi Arabia, which initially tried to stay neutral, condemned “heinous Iranian aggression” and said that “all capabilities” would be at the disposal of the Gulf states in any counterattacks against Iran.

 

As we watch the awesome display of U.S. military might, we remember that history has given us many reasons to have humility about the exercise of power. Whenever military force is used, the results are unpredictable and potentially dangerous. Trump himself warned in his remarks that there could be U.S. casualties. It’s obviously difficult to effect regime change from the air, even with Khamenei presumed dead. And we don’t have any good idea what might replace the Islamic Republic, although it’s hard to see how — for cold-blooded U.S. purposes — anything could be worse than the aggressively anti-American, terrorist regime in place in Tehran for nearly the last 50 years.

 

Another risk is that expending munitions and military assets against the Iranian regime will leave America weaker in a potential fight against China (even if there is also an argument that the fall of the regime would deprive China of a key ally in the Middle East).

 

While there is a case to be made that the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force was written so broadly that it could justify this campaign without congressional approval, by shutting out Congress, Trump has also short-circuited the attempt to make a case to the American people as to why this action was necessary at this time. Such a campaign of public persuasion is necessary to sustain any protracted campaign against Iran.

 

All that said, for decades, the unwritten rule was that Iran could kill and maim Americans, and we could never directly hit back. To his credit, Trump rejected this implicit arrangement last year in Midnight Hammer and, this time, has gone further. The campaign promises, at the very least, to lay waste to the nuclear and military infrastructure of the Iranian regime. This will set back these programs and capabilities in a way that will be difficult to recover from any time soon and will make it impossible for the regime to project its malign influence throughout the region on the level we’ve seen in recent decades.

 

Too often, American leadership has taken the easy way out by looking the other way regarding Iranian perfidy or seeking to paper it over with foolish diplomatic deals. In this sense, too, Trump is taking the hard way. We wish him and the U.S. military every success.

Europe in One Structure

By James Lileks

Sunday, March 01, 2026

 

Sagrada Familia, the famous cathedral in Barcelona, is almost finished. Last year, it became the tallest cathedral in the world; a few weeks ago, the central tower was topped with its crowning finial. It rises unchallenged over the flat and uniform rooflines, a marvelous hallucination, under construction since 1882. Its designer, the brilliant and iconoclastic architect Antoni Gaudí, would be pleased to see the structure rise to completion, since it was just a stump when he was run down by a tram in 1926. It’s a work of staggering complexity and detail, unlike anything on the planet, unless you include giant wasp hives.

 

But you should include wasp hives, because the cathedral resembles nothing more than a massive concatenation of towers extruded from the hindquarters of Brobdingnagian bugs. I don’t like it.

 

(Photo courtesy of the author)

 This, I assume, is a minority opinion. People make pilgrimages to ooh and ahh. Gaudí fans will brook no dissent on its genius; casual observers, however, may feel compelled to like it, since everyone praises its unique approach to cathedral styles. Most European churches are either gothic piles with a million fizzy details, or voluptuous Baroque basilicas with a massive dome above like a fat prelate on a commode. Not this one! Gaudí broke the mold!

 

Oh, that he did. But you are allowed to think it’s peculiar. You are permitted to say it’s bizarre. Everyone says it’s gorgeous, but it’s okay if you think it’s not.

 

(Photo courtesy of the author)

 But there is another lesson contained in the church. You can stand outside with a holier-than-thou smirk at all the people goggling because they are expected to goggle, but you, the Unbeliever, eventually will head inside.

 

Inside is the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen in your life.

 

(Photo courtesy of the author)

 If the outside writhes, bulges, contorts, batters your brain with a torrent of stone, the inside is the most supernatural space you’ve ever encountered. The columns aren’t Roman holdovers, but clean shafts whose style suggests an alternative version of human culture, hewing to some form of logic you’d never imagined, married with a stylized organic vocabulary, an abstraction of the natural world. And the light! The sun pours through the stained glass and paints the air itself with deep, saturated hues, like massed brass just outside of the range of human hearing.

 

All in all, as a church, it’s a good lesson for the skeptic: I was wrong about this. What else might I be wrong about?

 

Barcelona, we’re told, is overrun these days by tourists, and the locals have had enough. It’s their home, not a second-tier bucket-list destination. The tourist tax recently doubled and is set to increase every year. “Tourist Go Home” graffiti spatters walls and metal shutters. Doesn’t matter. People will perpetually pile in to admire the endless blocks of exquisitely civilized flats, the broad diagonal boulevards, the narrow warren of ancient streets in the old quarter, the Roman remainders, the busy beach with families and stout old bald men in black Speedos, the careworn public parks with hairy buskers and sun-basking youth. It’s a city that makes you feel profoundly sad that you were not born here — and that there isn’t an American equivalent.

 

There is another lesson, perhaps. Recall the words of the Spanish leftist politician Irene Montero, who recently defended the government’s decision to give amnesty to half a million migrants, and crowed: “I hope for ‘replacement theory,’ I hope we can sweep this country of fascists and racists with immigrants.”

 

What if the new arrivals don’t like the church for reasons of their own? It’s not hard to imagine a time a century hence when the citizens might cart off the stones of Sagrada Familia for their own purposes, as the inheritors of Rome pried the marble off the Coliseum. As much as you don’t like the exterior of the cathedral, the idea of its deconstruction suddenly makes you feel protective. It’s Europe, in one structure. There is a spirit inside the building, contained and condensed. Tear down the walls, and it escapes, never to be gathered like this again.