This was Pape’s argument in an April 6 op-ed for The New York Times. He writes that Iran does not rival the other great powers economically or militarily. Rather, “its newfound power derives from its control over the most important energy choke point in the global economy, the Strait of Hormuz.”

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Trump’s post, however, was deliberate strategic communication. It placed before the regime in Tehran a stark choice: Surrender your nuclear weapons program or face the destruction of Iran’s electricity and transportation grids—legitimate targets under the laws of war. Before nightfall, Trump had decided not to trigger the apocalypse. Instead, he announced a two-week ceasefire. His forbearance failed to mollify the critics. Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez spoke for many on both sides of the Atlantic when he said, “The government of Spain will not applaud those who set the world on fire just because they show up with a bucket.”

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These are the powerful Iraqi militias that helped to defeat the Islamic State in the mid-2010s after the group captured Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, in 2014. Today, those same militias have mounted sophisticated attacks against U.S. bases in Iraq and on civilian and energy infrastructure inside America’s closest allies in the war, such as Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. According to The Wall Street Journal, the militias are responsible for drone attacks on the Kuwaiti consulate in Basra and the Emirati consulate in Iraq’s Kurdistan region.

“Since the start of the conflict, the Kurdistan region has been consistently attacked externally by Iran and internally by the Iranian-backed militias,” Treefa Aziz, the Kurdistan Regional Government’s Washington representative, told me in an interview earlier this month. Aziz said that the Kurdistan region has absorbed more than 700 attacks from drones, missiles, mortars, and rockets, resulting in the deaths of 16 people and over 90 serious injuries. “The militias are responsible for a lot of havoc, and the government in Baghdad is not doing enough to rein them in.”

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The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) harbors explicit genocidal intentions against both Israel and the United States, famously branding these allies as the “Little Satan” and the “Great Satan.” It pursues nuclear weapons in service of those aims and presides over one of the world’s worst human-rights records. How is it possible that a regime defined by repression of freedoms at home—subjugating women, dissidents, LGBT, and others—and genocidal incitement abroad, could become an object of admiration among people who claim to advocate for human rights?

A recent study we carried out at the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI)—an organization that gathers data on how malicious narratives propagate in digital contexts—in collaboration with the Rutgers University Social Perception Lab found that “participants who expressed greater agreement with anti-Israel ideology more strongly endorsed Soviet and Nazi propaganda that featured both generic antisemitic tropes and anti-Israel tropes, had more left-wing (“progressive”) authoritarian attitudes, and rated the human rights records of some of the world’s worst human rights violators more favorably than those who expressed lower levels of agreement.”

Anti-Zionism, a worldview that casts Israel as the pinnacle of injustice while presenting itself as moral resistance, predicts what we call Moral Inversion Syndrome: a pattern in which the perceived human-rights standing of Western democratic states declines relative to that of authoritarian regimes. The study asked a representative online sample of Americans to rate the human-rights records of various countries and correlated those ratings with traits measured by validated psychological scales. According to our data, the more one expresses essentialist prejudice against Israel, or Jews, the more distorted one’s moral judgment becomes in general.

That distortion may show up first as a moral equivalence that many respondents draw between liberal and authoritarian states. Those with strongly anti-Zionist attitudes (as well as traditionally antisemitic ones; the two attitudes were correlated though not identical) often place oppressive regimes such as Iran, China, or North Korea on the same moral plane as liberal-democratic states like the United States or Australia. And Israel is seen as the worst of the worst.

Since 1948, anti-Zionists have formulated their cause as an inversion of the moral and legal right of the Jewish people to self-determination, which was recognized by the United Nations at Israel’s founding. Beginning with early efforts by the Arab League to promote a Palestinian “right of return” for refugees displaced in Israel’s war of independence—not to a future Palestinian state alongside Israel, but inside of Israeli territory, so as to dismantle the Jewish state—Israel’s very essence has been cast as immoral, unjust, and opposed to the post–WWII international order.

But our data clearly shows that anti-Zionism is an ideology that violates the human-rights order it claims to defend. By turning Israel into the scapegoat for modernity’s most foundational crimes—colonialism, apartheid, and genocide—it in fact undermines the very architecture that was constructed to prevent those crimes.

Moral inversion is not a new phenomenon. In the Bible, the prophet Isaiah warned of those who “call evil good and good evil.” The author George Orwell described how language can be used to “make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” Time and again, movements proclaiming liberation have carried out terror, from the Rwandan genocide against Tutsi “colonizers” to the Cambodian genocide against urban elites and “pro-American imperialists.” Even the founding father of 19th- and 20th-century antisemitism, Wilhelm Marr, defended his anti-Jewish agitation as “no more than a cry of pain from one of the oppressed.” Across the archive of mass atrocity, totalizing ideologies have inverted moral reality, recasting victims as oppressors and oppressors as righteous victims.

Recent work by scholars of antisemitism and anti-Zionism has emphasized how contemporary anti-Zionist libels often reproduce Soviet propaganda slogans—such as “Zionist colonialism” or “Zionists are Nazis”—disseminated globally after the 1967 war, when the Soviet Union sought to mobilize the third world against “international Zionism,” a canard that recast Jewish political rights as a global conspiracy against the rights of others.

Consistent with this pattern, our study finds that when respondents were shown Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda images—depicting Israelis as Nazis or linking the Star of David with dollar signs and swastikas—those who more strongly endorsed the images were more likely to make morally inverted human-rights judgments.

In 1975, the Soviet-Arab bloc passed the infamous “Zionism is racism” resolution at the United Nations—something the U.S. ambassador to the UN at the time, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, said “reeked of the totalitarian mind.” The resolution recast “Zionism” as the inverse of the emerging anti-racist and human rights order, a construction that, after the Cold War, reentered the Western left through the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa. Unsurprisingly, our study also finds that anti-Zionism and moral inversion correlate with “left-wing authoritarianism”—attitudes aimed at dismantling established hierarchies and norms in order to impose ostensibly “progressive” ends.

In the present day, the UN can hardly bring itself to condemn Iran’s targeting of Israeli civilians using cluster munitions, yet has no hesitation in establishing commissions to accuse Israel of genocide, collapsing the distinction between civilian casualties and the intentional destruction of a group.

Our study puts hard data onto this phenomenon of political and moral confusion, and its connection to anti-Zionist ideology. The study also suggests that the problem goes beyond just how Israel is perceived.

If anti-Zionism—whether in its left-wing form or in the increasingly visible right-wing variant promoted by figures such as Tucker Carlson—constructs Israel as an all-encompassing symbol of political evil in the contemporary order, then the Iran war takes on a more fundamental meaning. It begins to appear as a confrontation between the possibility of moral judgment and an ideology in which the very distinction between right and wrong has been turned upside down.

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It’s a head-spinning sequence of events. And it raises a basic question: How much of what’s being said online—including by the president—tracks with what’s actually happening on the ground? For an answer, we turn to historian and Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson. In today’s Big Read, he examines the widening gap between Truth Social and reality—and what that space in between tells us about where this war is headed. —The Editors

President Barack Obama was fond of the phrase the arc of history. His supporters, he said on the evening of his first election in 2008, had voted to “put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day.”

I have long doubted that history has an arc any more than it follows predictable cycles. Obama was, in fact, adapting something the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. said in a sermon at Washington’s National Cathedral in 1968. “The arc of the moral universe is long,” King declared, “but it bends toward justice.”

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As important as all of those issues are, the primary question now for the team led by Vice President J.D. Vance is understanding exactly who is calling the shots in Tehran.

Only a week ago, the Trump administration believed that the Iranian regime was run by a committee of five senior officials that included the two men leading their delegation in the Islamabad negotiations: Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and the speaker of Iran’s parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf.

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Contrary to a tide of commentary from both the progressive left and isolationist right, Doran argues that the American-Israeli campaign against Iran was the foreseeable consequence of decades of failed diplomacy. He dissects, one by one, seven myths that have shaped opinion on the war. With the situation still unresolved, his argument is as important now as when he first wrote it. And so we’re republishing it in our pages today.

—The Editors

Donald Trump’s actions in the Middle East continually surprise the foreign-policy establishment and the media elite. According to commentators on both the right and the left, the reason is that Trump is a megalomaniac—or, as Jon Stewart and former U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan recently agreed on The Daily Show, perhaps addicted to cocaine.

Yet while Trump has repeatedly defied the Beltway consensus on Iran and its allies over the past year and a half, none of the dire consequences that influential commentators predicted have come to pass. World War III hasn’t erupted. The global economy hasn’t collapsed. Instead, the Iranian leadership is dead or decapitated, its nuclear weapons program is buried beneath mountains of rubble, and most of its navy lies at the bottom of the sea. While the loss of 13 U.S. servicemen is a serious matter, it is hardly the thousands of dead and wounded that were routinely predicted as the consequence of any major U.S. action. Israel still exists. So do Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait, along with their oil reserves.

Trump has inflicted heavy punishment in return for relatively light consequences, but pundits insist that a masterful Iran is dictating events. Tehran’s “successful” war-fighting tactics supposedly forced Trump to accept a ceasefire. Onlookers were then baffled when the United States walked away from talks in Islamabad and took steps to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, to the strategic detriment of China and the benefit of U.S. energy producers.

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Trump’s optimism is due largely to this week’s direct meetings between representatives from Israel and Lebanon hosted by the State Department. The final communiqué for those talks expressed America’s hope that the meeting would be the first step toward a “comprehensive peace deal.”

All of that sounds like welcome news. The problem is that Israel is not currently at war with Lebanon; rather it’s fighting a war in Lebanon against Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy militia that has for more than 20 years been the most powerful armed faction inside of Lebanon. Hezbollah began firing rockets and missiles at Israel on March 1, two days after the U.S.-Israel war commenced against Iran.

It’s unclear whether Hezbollah, the terror group that operates mostly but not exclusively in Lebanon, will abide by the ceasefire. Trump has said it will. But a statement from the group did not say whether it recognized the agreement. “A ceasefire must include a comprehensive halt to attacks across all Lebanese territory, with no freedom of movement for Israeli forces, and a return to the situation prior to March 2,” the statement said.

That is not how Israel sees the ceasefire. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday said that Israeli forces would remain in southern Lebanon and that “quiet will beget quiet,” meaning Israel reserves the right to strike Hezbollah if Hezbollah fires at Israel.

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Through a 16-year process of extreme gerrymandering, the weakening of checks and balances, and the dragooning of independent media, Orbán transformed Hungary into what he called an “illiberal democracy.” His strongman tactics and confrontational rhetoric earned the country, a land of almost 10 million people on the periphery of Europe, an outsize role in international affairs, eliciting opprobrium from a Western liberal establishment that portrayed him as an autocrat. But according to his quasi-defenders, Orbán’s voluntary relinquishment of power proves that he was never the authoritarian, much less the out-and-out dictator, his critics claimed him to be.

“It seems commonsensical to say that if an ‘autocrat’ loses an election, he wasn’t an autocrat after all,” my friend Mike Pesca wrote in The Free Press. Rod Dreher, one of the many conservative intellectuals whom the Orbán government welcomed to Budapest, posted sarcastically, “But. . . but. . . but, I was told by so many experts and journalists in the West that this would never happen, that Orbán is a fascist dictator who would never surrender power!” And New York Times columnist Ross Douthat asserted that “strong political parties that bend the rules to entrench their power and succumb to corruption are a consistent feature of democracy qua democracy. And if your entrenched ruling party can lose everything in a wave election, you are not living in an authoritarian state.”

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Getting rid of enough of these mines to restore commercial shipping traffic is a huge priority for the U.S. Navy, which is beginning mine-clearing operations in the strait as part of President Donald Trump’s plan to blockade Iran. The Defense Department said on Monday that underwater drones would “join the clearance efforts in the coming days.”

But the Navy also has another not-so-secret weapon: dolphins.

Since 1959, the Navy’s Marine Mammal Program has trained bottlenose dolphins to find and mark the locations of mines that could endanger military or civilian ships. Dolphins have served in the Vietnam War, the Iran-Iraq War, and both Operation Noble Eagle and Operation Enduring Freedom, launched after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. They’ve guarded harbors and ships, protected a command ship in the Persian Gulf, and hunted for enemy swimmers, according to the U.S. Naval Undersea Museum.

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It’s not an unreasonable concern. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz is squeezing the global economy. Iran’s nuclear ambitions remain at the center of high-stakes negotiations. All the while, China—reportedly aiding Iran in targeting U.S. military sites—watches closely, waiting for the right moment to launch an attack it has spent decades preparing for: an invasion of Taiwan.

This would mark the biggest crisis of this century—the moment when tensions between the United States and its foremost rival finally come to a head, and the fate of an island at the center of the world’s most critical high-tech supply chains hangs in the balance. And it is a scenario for which, according to the author of today’s Big Read, we have no plan.

Eyck Freymann is the author of a new book, Defending Taiwan, and he offers a sweeping examination of this looming conflict, and what the United States must do to prevent it. Today’s essay, adapted from the book, drops us into the opening hours of a Taiwan crisis—and explains why our failure to learn from the Iran war may already be pushing us closer to global economic disaster than we realize. —The Editors

The strike comes without warning. A night watchman streaming television dramas on his smartphone tries to refresh the page. On the seafloor beneath the Taiwan Strait, underwater drones and frogmen are severing the dozens of undersea cables connecting Taiwan to the outside world. A university student scrolling social media assumes there is something wrong with the dormitory Wi-Fi. The bandwidth keeps slowing and slowing, until nothing will load at all. Then cyberattacks start to cripple the power plants that service downtown Taipei. Neon signs and streetlights go dark. Taipei’s broad boulevards are now illuminated only by headlights of passing cars and the moonlight.

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This goal is understandable. There is still around 1,000 pounds of highly enriched uranium trapped beneath the rubble of what used to be Iranian nuclear facilities. And even though the war has set Iran’s regime back several years from acquiring an apocalyptic arsenal, the stakes are as high as they get. If Iran gains nuclear weapons, the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism will have acquired a nuclear umbrella to protect its armies and many proxies from retaliation.

All that said, President Donald Trump should aim higher than just another nuclear deal that eventually expires. Trump should also demand that Iran’s regime respect the lives and security of its own citizens.

Iran’s nuclear program (with the exception of an unfinished facility known as Pickaxe Mountain) is almost entirely demolished. It’s possible the regime may seek to rebuild, but that will be an expensive and arduous task for a mafia state that is on its back. In other words, there is time to neutralize, either diplomatically or militarily, the Iranian nuclear threat down the road. A more pressing concern is the regime’s survival and whether it will stay in power through another massacre when and if Iranians take to the streets again, as they did three months ago.

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For a war of this scale, Sudan has drawn remarkably little sustained international attention. Compared to China’s Xinjiang (home to the Uyghurs) or Gaza, Sudan has remained largely peripheral to global discourse, despite the former area being massively harder to affect through outside intervention and the latter being much more contested. Here we have a confirmed genocide, a famine affecting a third of the population, and a death toll that dwarfs any other single conflict or atrocity on Earth, yet little interest in world capitals that can’t help but regularly decry what they perceive as the wrongs being perpetrated in certain foreign lands.

The war pits Sudan’s conventional military, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, against the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group commanded by Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo. Once allies who jointly removed longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019, and co-governed Sudan through a transitional period, the men fell out over who would control the country’s security forces once a civilian government was established. By April 2023, both sides were moving forces into position around Khartoum, with the RSF allegedly striking first against SAF bases.

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Is the United States war against Iran morally justifiable? There is a strong argument that it is, because the American and Israeli attack on Iran’s leadership and military meets the centuries-old conditions for a just war under the doctrine of the Catholic Church.

The Church is not pacifist in her doctrine. Waging just war is a last resort to protect the innocent by defeating the enemy. It is a virtuous act to take up arms in defense of the nation against an unjust aggressor.

Does this mean that one must wait for the enemy to attack before a nation can commence morally legitimate military action to neutralize the threat? No, that would be a dereliction of duty if the intent and capabilities of the prospective aggressor were known with certainty. The Iranian regime is a relentless enemy, using proxies to kill Americans and America’s allies. There is no doubt that Iran has been and presently is a grave threat.

The United States and Israel undertook the attack on Iran principally to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons. In February of this year, American negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, as Witkoff revealed to Fox News’ Sean Hannity, were stunned by what the Iranian side told them: “Both Iranian negotiators said to us directly with, you know, no shame, that they controlled 460 kilograms of 60 percent [enriched uranium] and they’re aware that that could make 11 nuclear bombs, and that was the beginning of their negotiating stance.” Witkoff continued: “Jared and I opened up with the Iranian negotiators telling us they had the inalienable right to enrich all their nuclear fuel that they possessed.”

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Orbán was a right-wing strongman: genuinely reactionary, an obstinate bully on the world stage and, by any reasonable accounting, corrupt. He was an intellectual hero to J.D. Vance, Tucker Carlson, and Donald Trump. He proudly called Hungary an “illiberal democracy”—his way of saying that the institutions would serve the party, not the other way around. For a while, Hungarians liked what he was doing. Then they didn’t. And they voted him out.

That last sentence is the one I want to linger on.

On his HBO show a week before the election, John Oliver said “independent observers have deemed Hungarian elections” since Orbán took power and started changing laws, “free but not fair, which is an interesting combination. You are free to vote for anyone you want, whether it’s Orbán or whoever inevitably loses to him.” The audience gave a big laugh.

He then threw to the Princeton sociologist Kim Lane Scheppele, who argued: “We tend to think of a coup as happening with tanks in the streets, you know, and the military takeover and the announcement on radio that all civil liberties have died. That’s not what autocracy looks like anymore. You don’t get phalanxes of tanks. You get phalanxes of lawyers.”

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Despite some confusing rhetoric over the weekend, the United States has not actually blockaded the Strait of Hormuz, as such, in really any sense at all. The source of the confusion was the president himself, who announced on Sunday that the “United States Navy . . . will begin the process of BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz.” This announcement didn’t make a great deal of sense. First of all, Iran was already engaged in a de facto blockade of the strait, and had been choking traffic through it to a minimum since early March. Each day it allowed through a handful of ships that were carrying Iranian cargo or, it seems, paying a toll to Iran. It would make sense for America to stop this Iranian-approved traffic—but why announce that we are stopping all the rest of the traffic, from Kuwait or the United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia—legal traffic from our partners that also needs to sail through the strait, destined for the world’s markets? Some of these ships were even our own.

Enter U.S. Central Command, the military organization tasked with American operations in the Middle East, which clarified a few hours later that, beginning at 10 a.m. ET on Monday, the U.S. military would blockade “all maritime traffic entering and exiting Iranian ports.” This made a good deal more sense. Iran had taken the world’s economy hostage by blocking lawful commerce out of the strait. Now the U.S., on behalf of the global economy, would even the playing field by starving Iran of the revenue it earns from maritime trade. The blockade would also extend to ships leaving Iranian ports on either side of the strait. (Iran has some significant port facilities on the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea, in addition to within the strait, which is in the Persian Gulf.)

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As an American who has lived and worked in Hungary for several years now—and not as one of the ideological tourists drawn here by the Orbán movement itself—I will say a few kind words about Viktor Orbán. The old battle-ax rose from a young anti-communist activist to prime minister to international political celebrity, no small feat for a kid from small-town Hungary. Much to the chagrin of liberal critics who wanted to use him as a symbol of everything around the world they disagreed with, Orbán was right about a few big issues, notably immigration and the importance of encouraging families to have more kids. One sign of his enduring influence is how widely his ideas have been copied: The European Parliament just passed tough new immigration enforcement measures slated to go into effect in June, and pro-natalism has gone from a fringe preoccupation to a thoroughly mainstream concern. Much of Orbánism’s program, it must be understood, has also been copied by the man who just defeated him. If Orbánism’s appeal for Hungarians remains, why was the man himself just tossed from power?

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Wars usually shut doors for American foreign policy. But this episode has revealed that Operation Epic Fury has opened them with uncommon force. To understand why requires an honest reckoning with Iran’s biggest mistake in this war. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) decision to weaponize the Strait of Hormuz ranks among the most consequential miscalculations in the regime’s history.

Following the American and Israeli strikes, the Revolutionary Guard pursued two anticipated outcomes from its Hormuz strategy.

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I asked evolutionary biologist Colin Wright to explain what turned these Ngogo chimpanzees against each other, whether their civil war can be stopped, and what it tells us about humans.

Wright isn’t one of the article’s authors, but he has studied various animal species and their social dynamics and community ecology. He is also founding editor of Reality’s Last Stand, an online publication about free speech, science, and reality, and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Tanner Nau: What’s going on with the chimpanzees? Why are they waging war on each other?

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“They have chosen not to accept our terms,” the vice president told reporters in Islamabad on Saturday before departing for Washington. “I think that’s bad news for Iran much more than it’s bad news for the United States of America.” Vance’s message was backed up by President Donald Trump, who told reporters over the weekend, “Whether we make a deal or not makes no difference to me. And the reason is because we’ve won.”

Going into the talks, the Iranians acted as if they had the upper hand. Iran’s threats to international shipping through the vital choke point of the Strait of Hormuz threatened to send the global economy into a tailspin. Trump said he had an agreement before the talks for Iran to open the strait in exchange for a ceasefire. But when the negotiations began, the strait remained largely closed.

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