her angle-of-attack is clean and her composure it never stalls. Never fails to amaze, these lucid streamlines of CB prose, and how much they both contain and deliver with zero spillage.
By severest contrast what exchange i have with a handful of interlocutors reveals lazy, dissolute blurtations that are enough to make one cry.
Aee we not to remain in earnest? Are we to seek some sort of adaption to the LCD?
That Thomas M Gregg fellow renders clean, lean and purposive as well. (oh but how can one man LOOK so drastically uncool? )
"As usual, he’s expressing them like a pompous fool.² But he’s right to say that this was a selective leak, that it was regurgitated uncritically and without effort to assess its value, and that a journalist who asked why she was on the receiving end of this leak might wind up doing more useful reporting that way than by serving as the leaker’s obedient amanuensis”
For Vance to take someone for playing fast and loose with the facts for personal or political gain is almost equivalent to a US president sending the National Guard to quell a civic disturbance after having pardoned 1500 civic disturbers. Or a Secretary of Defense vowing an investigation into a security leak after having blatantly committed one himself.
There’s so much hypocrisy floating around our entire political establishment as to warrant a full issue of MAD magazine.
Or, where is Tom Lehr now that we really need him.
Amazingly, Tom Lehrer is still alive, at a sprightly 97. It's irony that's not merely dead, but undergoing time-space obliteration deep within a black hole.
It's been hilarious to watch the same people who insisted Iran DID NOT have a nuclear program !!! now confidently doomsplain that Iran will surely be assembling the bomb within weeks. How can you live with that level of cognitive dissonance? I've seen a few Ben Rhodes' tweets in the past few days and I've decided I feel sorry for him. It's like a less dramatic version of Khamenei huddling alone in his bunker, an old man, all his confidantes of years dead, Israeli bombs shaking the walls. What a psychic wound to be proved horribly, catastrophically wrong.
I'm not worried about Iran. They've been publicly humiliated and left bloodied on the concrete in one of the toughest geopolitical neighbourhoods in the world. The Sunni Arab states will keep them in line even if Israel never again lifts a finger.
I wonder if it's too soon to talk about the end of Islamist terror-politics, like the defeat of Nasser in '67 shattered pan-Arabism. Probably that's over-optimistic. But I would venture that the region is losing its appetite for the Palestinian quagmire. We're heading into a new political era - the new multipolar world. Old certainties are evaporating, power dynamics are realigning and the student debate club that has passed for international politics for the past while will soon be a relic of history. We all have bigger problems now.
With modern guided munitions and trained airman, precision bombing has advanced from an art into a science. Satellite images of Fodrow, along with this mornings (26/06) press conference, there is a fair chance some damage was done. How much and what damage was accomplished needs an eyes on inspection, until then, it's all Clauswitzen.
I invested two plus hours in a straight-through-no-break reading of this, and then laid out nine bucks for the privilege of writing and sharing this post. In the mid 60's I served a 7- year stint in Washington DC as a young man in what would become the Department of Education. It signaled my transformation from an academic into a policy scientist (the formal study of the impact of knowledge on public policy). After that I re-entered the academy, Hands down, Claire Berlinski, your presentation here is one of the most stunning pieces of policy science I have encountered in my now close-to-its-swan-song career. The fascinating Scandia film helped, but you capitalized famously with its use.
I got your point about JD Vance's posting, but you were far. far too generous in the praise you offered.. How could you have resisted underscoring its blatant sycophancy pointing its Trumpian finger at the tired trope about the 'fake media'? I was struck by the wicked contrast between the analysis you provided us all with the "shaped charge" that was Vance's attempt at spin.
Congratulations for your superb work on this, (Time to hit the hay; it's past 10:00 PM.) Thank you for your impressive work on this.
Wow! This must rank among the most gratifying comments a reader has ever left here. Thank you *so much* for subscribing and telling me this. To be honest, I woke up wondering if writing this had been a poor use of time. "I probably could have just written that it's far too soon to say," I was thinking, "I could have skipped the long disquisition on the density of earth materials--probably most people just skimmed that, if they didn't stop reading altogether." Knowing that at least one reader finds that stuff as interesting as I did was such a pleasant surprise. You've absolutely made my day.
I think, though (if I'm less self-critical but still critical), that my explanation of what we might be able to piece together from SIGINT and other technical means was incomplete. I'm debating with myself whether this warrants a post. I think I gave some of our capabilities short shrift. We can get some hints by sampling for isotopes and smoke in the atmosphere, for example. But ultimately, my conclusion remains: "Looks like we got them pretty good, but it's too soon to say."
Thank you! I think there's some value in explaining just what that fog is made of, don't you? Otherwise, I'm not sure people will understand just why it's so hard to work out what those bombs did and didn't do.
Regardless of any leaks, it was clear to me almost immediately that we would not have certainty on the effectiveness of these strikes. And also that these strikes would likely preclude future international inspections.
There’s now a half ton of nuclear fuel on the loose in a nation infamous for sponsoring terrorism.
My personal opinion is we were far better off in a multinational agreement to keep Iran from welding nuclear weapons.
The trope leveled at that agreement unfairly was that it would assure Iran’s eventual nuclear capability. But that was false — it only required renegotiation after sunsetting.
This action, on the other hand, assured Iran will be motivated to pursue nuclear capability for its own survival and perhaps as a retributive sneak attack. This insecurity we are now facing was totally avoidable imo.
We should not have been the ones to violate it first--that was immensely foolish. But I agree with critics who say that the agreement was poorly conceived. It was based on an unsophisticated grasp of Iran's regional strategy. Obama should have kept the sanctions vice on them longer to see if they were willing to negotiate on the other key issues--their missile program and their proxies--and if they were not, he should have coordinated with Israel to undertake the more coercive form of diplomacy we've seen in past weeks. Iran leveraged its nuclear-program as blackmail, which prevented us from responding to its regional aggression.
Had we been more willing to confront Iran, a million Syrians might not have lost their lives. (We did confront the Houthis indirectly, by arming the Saudis, but the incompetent slaughter they unleashed achieved nothing. I don't know if a better policy was available to us, but the deaths of as many as half a million Yemenis can't be reckoned a policy success.) Sanctions relief left the coffers of Hamas and Hezbollah swollen, making both far more dangerous, and ultimately, this made a confrontation with Iran inevitable. So the JCPOA would have perished one way or another.
It was, however, not at all to our advantage to be seen as the ones who broke the agreement.
By the way, the JCPOA is actually still in force--we were not the only signatories--but Iran was nonetheless cheerfully violating it. People who say, "If only we'd stayed in it, this could all have been avoided" need to account for this.
I'm inclined to think that probably, Iran wasn't planning to build a nuclear weapon, at least not in the near term. Probably, they were enriching to 60 percent and playing hide-and-seek with the IAEA as a bargaining tactic, seeking to coerce us into lifting the sanctions. They certainly *did* have an advanced and serious plan to destroy Israel, but the tool they meant to use for this was the ring of fire, not a nuclear bomb.
My confidence in this assessment isn't that high, however, and this isn't the kind of judgement on which you can bet the entire global non-proliferation regime (or your life). An Iran that's covertly trying to build the Bomb would look very much like an Iran that's pretending it is covertly trying to build the Bomb. There's no certain way to disambiguate them. We had no choice but to assume the worst; anything else would have been grossly irresponsible. (I am not giving Trump credit for "responsibility." He made the right decision only by accident.)
Given the aspects of the regime's ideology and behavior that are unambiguous--we know for sure that it seeks to dominate and subjugate the region, establish a Shia caliphate, subject Jews to another Holocaust, and, ultimately, spread its revolution around the globe, if necessary by force--we had no choice but to assume that it might very well build a nuclear weapon. Particularly since it has so far had no compunction about shedding rivers of blood in pursuit of its aims, we had no choice but to assume it might use it, too. Whether they meant to use it or not--and I suspect the answer is "probably not"--the danger involved in this would be unacceptable, for reasons I've detailed elsewhere.
Westerners are chronically prone to refusing to take the regime's ideology seriously. What its leaders believe is so alien--so discordant with every modern sensibility--that Obama, at least, seemed to have convinced himself that "Death to America" might just be a figure of speech that meant something like, "We are very cross with the Americans, for reasons that are actually quite intelligible." He concluded, absent evidence, that the mullahs would mellow out if they had access to the global economy. This was a very profound mistake. The JCPOA was working, yes, but that didn't mean the regime had relinquished its fundamental aims, and in so far as this was so, a confrontation was inevitable.
Of course, if we hadn't withdrawn from the JCPOA, it's possible the confrontation could have been postponed. The regime might have collapsed before the crisis came to a head. And we might have managed to put a more competent administration in power, one that would have been better able to handle it. Trump may have made the right decision to strike the nuclear facilities--time will tell--but I think we'd all agree that the odds are not good that he and his team of misfits will be able to handle whatever comes next.
Over the years, our policy toward Iran has been completely incoherent. We wouldn't be in this position now if we had been capable of formulating and executing a long-term, patient containment strategy, backed up by the consistent application of force. But we no longer seem to be able to think through this kind of problem or execute a bipartisan foreign policy spanning more than a single administration. One president after another has promised Americans a quick and easy fix to this problem. There is none.
her angle-of-attack is clean and her composure it never stalls. Never fails to amaze, these lucid streamlines of CB prose, and how much they both contain and deliver with zero spillage.
By severest contrast what exchange i have with a handful of interlocutors reveals lazy, dissolute blurtations that are enough to make one cry.
Aee we not to remain in earnest? Are we to seek some sort of adaption to the LCD?
That Thomas M Gregg fellow renders clean, lean and purposive as well. (oh but how can one man LOOK so drastically uncool? )
"As usual, he’s expressing them like a pompous fool.² But he’s right to say that this was a selective leak, that it was regurgitated uncritically and without effort to assess its value, and that a journalist who asked why she was on the receiving end of this leak might wind up doing more useful reporting that way than by serving as the leaker’s obedient amanuensis”
For Vance to take someone for playing fast and loose with the facts for personal or political gain is almost equivalent to a US president sending the National Guard to quell a civic disturbance after having pardoned 1500 civic disturbers. Or a Secretary of Defense vowing an investigation into a security leak after having blatantly committed one himself.
There’s so much hypocrisy floating around our entire political establishment as to warrant a full issue of MAD magazine.
Or, where is Tom Lehr now that we really need him.
Amazingly, Tom Lehrer is still alive, at a sprightly 97. It's irony that's not merely dead, but undergoing time-space obliteration deep within a black hole.
It's been hilarious to watch the same people who insisted Iran DID NOT have a nuclear program !!! now confidently doomsplain that Iran will surely be assembling the bomb within weeks. How can you live with that level of cognitive dissonance? I've seen a few Ben Rhodes' tweets in the past few days and I've decided I feel sorry for him. It's like a less dramatic version of Khamenei huddling alone in his bunker, an old man, all his confidantes of years dead, Israeli bombs shaking the walls. What a psychic wound to be proved horribly, catastrophically wrong.
I'm not worried about Iran. They've been publicly humiliated and left bloodied on the concrete in one of the toughest geopolitical neighbourhoods in the world. The Sunni Arab states will keep them in line even if Israel never again lifts a finger.
I wonder if it's too soon to talk about the end of Islamist terror-politics, like the defeat of Nasser in '67 shattered pan-Arabism. Probably that's over-optimistic. But I would venture that the region is losing its appetite for the Palestinian quagmire. We're heading into a new political era - the new multipolar world. Old certainties are evaporating, power dynamics are realigning and the student debate club that has passed for international politics for the past while will soon be a relic of history. We all have bigger problems now.
With modern guided munitions and trained airman, precision bombing has advanced from an art into a science. Satellite images of Fodrow, along with this mornings (26/06) press conference, there is a fair chance some damage was done. How much and what damage was accomplished needs an eyes on inspection, until then, it's all Clauswitzen.
The Christian chirpy attack bunny 😂 thanks for that one Claire
Thank you for your much needed public service announcement regarding the complete incorrectness of "nucular".
Homer Simpson taught me the correct pronunciation decades ago
I invested two plus hours in a straight-through-no-break reading of this, and then laid out nine bucks for the privilege of writing and sharing this post. In the mid 60's I served a 7- year stint in Washington DC as a young man in what would become the Department of Education. It signaled my transformation from an academic into a policy scientist (the formal study of the impact of knowledge on public policy). After that I re-entered the academy, Hands down, Claire Berlinski, your presentation here is one of the most stunning pieces of policy science I have encountered in my now close-to-its-swan-song career. The fascinating Scandia film helped, but you capitalized famously with its use.
I got your point about JD Vance's posting, but you were far. far too generous in the praise you offered.. How could you have resisted underscoring its blatant sycophancy pointing its Trumpian finger at the tired trope about the 'fake media'? I was struck by the wicked contrast between the analysis you provided us all with the "shaped charge" that was Vance's attempt at spin.
Congratulations for your superb work on this, (Time to hit the hay; it's past 10:00 PM.) Thank you for your impressive work on this.
Wow! This must rank among the most gratifying comments a reader has ever left here. Thank you *so much* for subscribing and telling me this. To be honest, I woke up wondering if writing this had been a poor use of time. "I probably could have just written that it's far too soon to say," I was thinking, "I could have skipped the long disquisition on the density of earth materials--probably most people just skimmed that, if they didn't stop reading altogether." Knowing that at least one reader finds that stuff as interesting as I did was such a pleasant surprise. You've absolutely made my day.
I think, though (if I'm less self-critical but still critical), that my explanation of what we might be able to piece together from SIGINT and other technical means was incomplete. I'm debating with myself whether this warrants a post. I think I gave some of our capabilities short shrift. We can get some hints by sampling for isotopes and smoke in the atmosphere, for example. But ultimately, my conclusion remains: "Looks like we got them pretty good, but it's too soon to say."
Congratulations, you've written a 25 page paper describing 'the fog of war.' With that said; it is very insightful, well constructed, and documented.
Thank you! I think there's some value in explaining just what that fog is made of, don't you? Otherwise, I'm not sure people will understand just why it's so hard to work out what those bombs did and didn't do.
Did you see that JibJab short video “This Land” back during the Bush-Kerry election?
“You can’t say nuclear
That really scares me…”
Regardless of any leaks, it was clear to me almost immediately that we would not have certainty on the effectiveness of these strikes. And also that these strikes would likely preclude future international inspections.
There’s now a half ton of nuclear fuel on the loose in a nation infamous for sponsoring terrorism.
My personal opinion is we were far better off in a multinational agreement to keep Iran from welding nuclear weapons.
The trope leveled at that agreement unfairly was that it would assure Iran’s eventual nuclear capability. But that was false — it only required renegotiation after sunsetting.
This action, on the other hand, assured Iran will be motivated to pursue nuclear capability for its own survival and perhaps as a retributive sneak attack. This insecurity we are now facing was totally avoidable imo.
If you haven't yet read it, I think Kori Schake's remarks here are sensible. I agree with her evaluation of the JCPOA's advantages and limitations: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/opinion/iran-israel-nuclear-trump.html?unlocked_article_code=1.R08.YVUr.um7VH5slIWBV&smid=url-share.
We should not have been the ones to violate it first--that was immensely foolish. But I agree with critics who say that the agreement was poorly conceived. It was based on an unsophisticated grasp of Iran's regional strategy. Obama should have kept the sanctions vice on them longer to see if they were willing to negotiate on the other key issues--their missile program and their proxies--and if they were not, he should have coordinated with Israel to undertake the more coercive form of diplomacy we've seen in past weeks. Iran leveraged its nuclear-program as blackmail, which prevented us from responding to its regional aggression.
Had we been more willing to confront Iran, a million Syrians might not have lost their lives. (We did confront the Houthis indirectly, by arming the Saudis, but the incompetent slaughter they unleashed achieved nothing. I don't know if a better policy was available to us, but the deaths of as many as half a million Yemenis can't be reckoned a policy success.) Sanctions relief left the coffers of Hamas and Hezbollah swollen, making both far more dangerous, and ultimately, this made a confrontation with Iran inevitable. So the JCPOA would have perished one way or another.
It was, however, not at all to our advantage to be seen as the ones who broke the agreement.
By the way, the JCPOA is actually still in force--we were not the only signatories--but Iran was nonetheless cheerfully violating it. People who say, "If only we'd stayed in it, this could all have been avoided" need to account for this.
I'm inclined to think that probably, Iran wasn't planning to build a nuclear weapon, at least not in the near term. Probably, they were enriching to 60 percent and playing hide-and-seek with the IAEA as a bargaining tactic, seeking to coerce us into lifting the sanctions. They certainly *did* have an advanced and serious plan to destroy Israel, but the tool they meant to use for this was the ring of fire, not a nuclear bomb.
My confidence in this assessment isn't that high, however, and this isn't the kind of judgement on which you can bet the entire global non-proliferation regime (or your life). An Iran that's covertly trying to build the Bomb would look very much like an Iran that's pretending it is covertly trying to build the Bomb. There's no certain way to disambiguate them. We had no choice but to assume the worst; anything else would have been grossly irresponsible. (I am not giving Trump credit for "responsibility." He made the right decision only by accident.)
Given the aspects of the regime's ideology and behavior that are unambiguous--we know for sure that it seeks to dominate and subjugate the region, establish a Shia caliphate, subject Jews to another Holocaust, and, ultimately, spread its revolution around the globe, if necessary by force--we had no choice but to assume that it might very well build a nuclear weapon. Particularly since it has so far had no compunction about shedding rivers of blood in pursuit of its aims, we had no choice but to assume it might use it, too. Whether they meant to use it or not--and I suspect the answer is "probably not"--the danger involved in this would be unacceptable, for reasons I've detailed elsewhere.
Westerners are chronically prone to refusing to take the regime's ideology seriously. What its leaders believe is so alien--so discordant with every modern sensibility--that Obama, at least, seemed to have convinced himself that "Death to America" might just be a figure of speech that meant something like, "We are very cross with the Americans, for reasons that are actually quite intelligible." He concluded, absent evidence, that the mullahs would mellow out if they had access to the global economy. This was a very profound mistake. The JCPOA was working, yes, but that didn't mean the regime had relinquished its fundamental aims, and in so far as this was so, a confrontation was inevitable.
Of course, if we hadn't withdrawn from the JCPOA, it's possible the confrontation could have been postponed. The regime might have collapsed before the crisis came to a head. And we might have managed to put a more competent administration in power, one that would have been better able to handle it. Trump may have made the right decision to strike the nuclear facilities--time will tell--but I think we'd all agree that the odds are not good that he and his team of misfits will be able to handle whatever comes next.
Over the years, our policy toward Iran has been completely incoherent. We wouldn't be in this position now if we had been capable of formulating and executing a long-term, patient containment strategy, backed up by the consistent application of force. But we no longer seem to be able to think through this kind of problem or execute a bipartisan foreign policy spanning more than a single administration. One president after another has promised Americans a quick and easy fix to this problem. There is none.
(NB to the person who "liked" this--I edited it and clarified a few points.)
I agree that leaving the JCPOA was idiotic. But I don't believe it would have contained Iran for long. We probably would have wound up here anyway.