We begin the day with Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect and his observation that government decapitations does not constitute regime change.
Such are the limits of government decapitations. They are not a form of regime change. Absent the ability of the populace to take the power that should be theirs, decapitations may just be a form of upward mobility for the regime’s surviving elites, now that there are unfilled slots above them. [,,,]
Shortly after American troops, under the orders of George W. Bush, toppled the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein, Bush held a rally on a carrier festooned with a giant sign: “Mission Accomplished.” It was nowhere near to being accomplished, of course; the vast majority of American and Iraqi casualties were still to come. Indeed, as a consequence of that war, the Iranian influence over Iraq ballooned, and it remains outsized to this day.
Trump is plainly yearning to unfurl his own Mission Accomplished banner (unlike Bush’s, probably with his picture on it). It would be, to put it mildly, surprising if it isn’t just as calamitously inaccurate as Bush’s.
But the decapitation machine rolls on. According to a report in The New York Times last Thursday, Trump’s policy toward Cuba seeks to replace President Miguel Díaz-Canel with somebody else from the current regime. The Timesreports that Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently told an associate that “the U.S. had struggled to identify a Cuban equivalent to Delcy Rodríguez of Venezuela, the former vice president who succeeded Mr. Maduro and has been cooperating with the Trump administration’s moves to control the country’s oil.” (Iran, you may have noticed, also has oil.)
Subect experts from The Brookings Institution weighed in on the many dimensions of the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran.
Vanda Felbab-Brown sensibly points out that the Iranian regime will not simply wither away quickly.
In the first days of airstrikes, the United States and Israel killed the ayatollah as well as several top leaders of the Iranian military and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), adding to those killed in July 2025 during the joint attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities. But the Iranian regime is vast, with sprawling religious authority, layers of officers across various armed branches and militias, and widespread control of the country’s economic assets. Even if the United States and Israel continue mowing down newly-replaced leaders for weeks, the IRGC and various armed forces and their economic assets will not just melt away, even if they eventually fracture. [...]
The Trump administration broke a cruel, brutal, and dangerous regime with little clarity, planning, readiness, and accountability for how to foster a new, desirable replacement system. In Venezuela, it remains satisfied with 99% of the Maduro regime staying in power, including those with egregious human rights records, and only cosmetic political liberalization, as long as the “new” regime appears to be doing U.S. oil bidding. President Donald Trump is hinting that such a minimal change of leadership in Iran may be enough for him. It hardly will be for the Iranian people or Israel.
Asli Aydintasbas looks at the inevitable increase in regional tensions between Turkey and Israel.
One consequence, however, is already coming into view: this war is sharpening the enmity between Turkey and Israel, pushing them closer to a long-term collision. [...]
Turkey doesn’t want another war at its doorstep and will quietly work with the Trump administration and regime insiders to identify an off-ramp—not out of sympathy for Tehran but because it fears the day after. Iran and Turkey are historic rivals, and Turks have long been nervous about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, missile capabilities, and proxy networks. But Turkish officials also feared that war would bring prolonged instability and produce consequences worse than the status quo—including refugee flows, trade and energy disruption, and the possibility that turmoil inside Iran could create new space for Kurdistan Workers’ Party-linked Kurdish autonomy inside Iran. Turkey does not believe regime change is in the cards.
Ankara’s deeper concern, however, is geopolitical. It prefers the Iran it knows to a postwar order shaped more decisively by Israel. In Turkish eyes, American and Israeli aims diverge. Trump is seen as a transactional actor who may still declare a quick victory and return to nuclear diplomacy. Israel, by contrast, is viewed by Turks as pursuing something broader: an ideological transformation, a fractured Iran, and a Middle East reorganized around Israeli military primacy. That will inevitably clash with Turkey’s own interests and quest for regional influence.
Sophia Tesfaye of Salon notes that the mainstream media still prefers its “war porn” to solid fact-based questions.
The president did not deliver a traditional address to the American people on network television, instead posting a hastily-edited eight-minute video statement to Truth Social. Israel assassinated Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the leader of an adversarial state. American service members are dead — and the president has acknowledged there will likely be more to come. Iranian missiles are flying, hitting Israel and U.S. military outposts and interests throughout the Middle East. And the best the American people receive is a 3 a.m. Truth Social announcement delivered in a MAGA hat. No senior administration officials have appeared on the flagship public affairs programs that, for all their flaws, have long served as a forum for democratic accountability.
Instead of structured briefings, Trump spent the weekend personally calling journalists — more than a dozen of them — fielding one or two questions at a time from the comfort of Mar-a-Lago. He spoke with reporters from The Atlantic, the Washington Post, Axios, the New York Times, ABC News and other media outlets, offering a scattershot array of justifications and timelines. To one outlet, the aim is “freedom for the people” of Iran. To another, perhaps this can end “in two or three days” with a deal. To a third, it might take “four to five weeks,” and he has “three very good choices” to take control in Tehran — until, in another conversation, he suggests those choices are dead. [...]
Donald Trump’s war on the media has paid off. When the president bypasses traditional forums, it feels like just another norm shattered in an endless stream of shattered norms. When he declines to brief the public in a sustained way, it barely registers. When contradictions pile up, they are chalked up to style rather than substance. In the end, however, the punditry did not need to be coerced into cheerleading. It just needed, as it always has, the opportunity.
Finally today, The Editorial Board of The New York Times. praises four law firms that refused to capitulate to the tacky shoe salesman’s demands and, as a result, the Trump regime abandoned their appeals to those law firms challenges to Trump’s executive orders.
The four law firms that last year chose to fight President Trump’s illegal intimidation campaign have won vindication. Federal judges had already struck down Mr. Trump’s executive orders trying to punish the firms for representing or employing people he considered to be his political enemies. On Monday, the Trump administration abandoned its appeals of those rulings, accepting defeat.
The victories of the four firms — Jenner & Block, Susman Godfrey, Perkins Coie and WilmerHale — are a triumph for justice and democracy. The executive orders that Mr. Trump signed early in his second term were based on the lie that the firms had done something wrong. In fact, their lawyers were merely doing their jobs. They happened to represent Democrats and liberal groups or participated in prior investigations of him. And his would-be punishments of the firms had the potential to damage them badly. The executive orders barred the firms’ lawyers from entering federal buildings and meeting with federal officials, activities that are a necessary part of many legal cases. [...]
...Nine other firms folded and struck deals intended to mollify the president. The deals included promises to perform millions of dollars of pro bono work on behalf of Trump-friendly clients.
These nine firms all failed a high-stakes character test. Their leaders faced a choice between submitting to a bully and doing the right thing. The firms are not household names to most Americans, but it is worth listing them here. We hope that clients looking for fearless attorneys and law students deciding where to work will remember which elite firms were unwilling to fight back. Meekness is not a quality most people seek in a lawyer.
