Israel Tests Theory That War Can't Be Won With Air Power Alone
Since last week, wave upon wave of Israeli warplanes has hit targets across Iran—testing the limits of what air power alone can achieve in conflict.
Conventional wisdom among military thinkers has long been that missiles and bombs, while essential to modern warfare, are seldom enough to achieve victory on their own, especially if the strategic aims of the warring states are expansive.
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USA Today
28 minutes ago
- USA Today
Iran says no talks without ceasefire as missiles explode over Tel Aviv: Live updates
Iran says no talks without ceasefire as missiles explode over Tel Aviv: Live updates "There is no room for negotiations with the U.S. until Israeli aggression stops," Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on June 20. Show Caption Hide Caption President Trump to make decision on Iran within two weeks President Donald Trump says he will make a decision on striking Iran within two weeks as he waits on possible negotiations, the White House says. Iran's top diplomat said there could be no negotiations over Tehran's nuclear program while Israeli bombs continue to fall, making a ceasefire in the eight-day war a condition for renewed talks with the Trump administration. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi's statement came a day after President Donald Trump opened a possible two-week window for talks, turning down expectations of imminent U.S. airstrikes on Iran's nuclear facilities. "There is no room for negotiations with the U.S. until Israeli aggression stops," Araghchi was quoted as saying on Iranian state TV on June 20. But the airstrikes kept coming. Israel said it hit Iranian missile facilites overnight, while an Iranian missile stuck in southern Israel. The number of casualites were unclear. Iran said June 16 that 240 people had been killed in Israeli attacks. At least 24 Israelis have been killed by Iranian fire. Follow along with USA TODAY for live updates of the Israel-Iran crisis. Explosions heard over Tel Aviv For the eighth day in a row, the consussion of missile and interceptors echoed over Tel Aviv. Iranian news reports said a new fusillade of missiles had been fired toward Israel. Israeli officials said they were working to intercept the ballistic missiles. While taking a pummeling from Israel, Iran has managed several times to pierce its enemy's "Iron Dome" defensive shield, striking neighborhoods, hospitals and a research institute.
Fox News
33 minutes ago
- Fox News
DAVID MARCUS: Your social media feed is being hijacked to divide MAGA supporters
As our society buries itself deeper and deeper into the cave of social media, we are seeing a growing divide between what happens in our real world and what we see on platforms like X and TikTok. A bombshell new report from the National Contagion Research Institute shows much of this is being directed by our foreign enemies. It also shows one of their top goals is to infiltrate and divide the MAGA movement. According to NCRI, Russia and Iran have been employing tens of thousands of bots to inject extreme rhetoric into American social media discourse, and perhaps more importantly, to artificially inflate the influence of content creators who push radical and divisive agendas. To quote one NCRI analyst, "If you talk to Republicans right now, more than 80% of them support the war against Iran. But if you go on Twitter [X] you get the sense that there is a civil war raging." This manipulation of social media by our enemies is far more insidious than most Americans realize, so let's walk through how this kind of information operation, the technical name for propaganda, works. Imagine, for example, that there was an obscure comedian, or Instagram model who began to "just ask questions," about why Jews run everything, or why black people commit crimes. Even better, they might post about how they aren't allowed to ask these very questions and insinuate that neither are you. At this point, according to the report, Russian and Iranian bot armies will begin to follow these radical accounts, massively pumping up their numbers. It will like and share the most divisive content, and work behind the scenes to make this person famous. On platforms that monetize interaction, this can mean very large payouts for creators, as spy bots mindlessly watch their videos over and over, and the beauty of it is that the content creator never even has to know they are getting paid off. When we talk about influencers being bought and paid for by foreign foes, it may not mean a duffle bag full of cash in a bus station locker, simply by using thousands of bots to juice the numbers, the social media companies themselves facilitate the payouts. Perhaps the most obvious way we can see this malign foreign influence online is in the incredible amount of casual racism and antisemitism, supposedly being posted by Americans, that we see on X. These hate posts range from straight-up Nazi apologism, to memes about fatherless black homes, or weird eugenics IQ graphs, and if their prevalence in the algorithm accurately reflects the level of racism in America, then this is a deeply racist country. Only it isn't. Because X does not accurately reflect our society, instead countries that despise America are infusing hate into the platform and propping up the handful of real people willing to push racism and division. What the Russian and Iranian bot farms hope we will believe is that America is full of secret racists who will only say their true beliefs through their anonymous personas, but this is absurd, America knows IRL, that that kind of racism is buried in our past. The question becomes, what can we do to fight back against this massive information operation aimed at our minds? Liberals have long taken the exact wrong approach, which is to try to protect the end user from malicious content. This always adds up to censorship, one way or the other. The better approach, at least as far as the government is concerned, is to target the bot farms and countries that back them. This can be done through cyberattacks, sanctions, any number of measures. There is also a role for the social media industry to play here. We are hearing growing calls for X to use a flag to identify the country of origin of its accounts. This would immediately help users see through the foreign operations. The silver lining in all of this, as the report shows, is that making the leap from influence on a social media screen to influence in the real world is not as easy as we might have once imagined. These foreign-backed influencers have few outlets they can go to off of social media. Sure, Piers Morgan may put on anyone with 250k followers no matter how awful they are, but Main Street America isn't seeing it. As a free society, America is by definition vulnerable to informational attacks, and as citizens in that free society all of us bear a responsibility to process the unfettered flow of information we have access to in responsible ways. Make no mistake, your social media feed is under direct foreign attack. So far, the attacks haven't done too much damage, but keeping it that way, first and foremost, starts with all of us.
CNN
38 minutes ago
- CNN
Trump's new two-week negotiating window sets off scramble to restart stalled Iran talks
Source: CNN President Donald Trump's decision to open a two-week negotiating window before deciding on striking Iran sets off an urgent effort to restart talks that had been deadlocked when Israel began its bombing campaign last week. The hope among Trump and his advisers is that Iran — under constant Israeli attack and having suffered losses to its missile arsenal — will relent on its hardline position and agree to terms it had previously rejected, including abandoning its enrichment of uranium, according to US officials . The deferred decision, which came after days of increasingly martial messages from the president suggesting he was preparing to order a strike, also gives Trump more time to weigh the potential consequences — including the chance it could drag the United States into the type of foreign conflict he promised to avoid. But negotiating a diplomatic solution in Trump's condensed timeline appeared to face significant early hurdles. Earlier this week, discussions were underway inside the White House to dispatch Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff and Vice President JD Vance to the region for talks with Iran. But as Trump grew wary that diplomatic efforts might succeed, the idea never resulted in scheduled talks, and both Vance and Witkoff remained in Washington as of Thursday. Foreign ministers from Britain, Germany and France are traveling to Geneva on Friday to hold talks with Iranian representatives, and have been briefed on the details of the last deal Witkoff offered to Iran, which Tehran ultimately rejected before the Israeli strikes began. Among US officials, there were not high expectations of success for Friday's meeting in Geneva, one US official said. But a White House official kept the door open to progress. 'This is a meeting between European leaders and Iran. The President supports diplomatic efforts from our allies that could bring Iran closer to taking his deal,' a White House official said. Iran's consistent message to the US since Israel began its strikes a week ago has been they will not engage in further talks with the US until the ongoing Israeli operation ends, two sources familiar with the messages said. The US has so far not pressured Israel to halt its strikes, sources said. And Trump said this week that his message to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been to 'keep going.' So far, Iran has offered no indication it is willing to move off its positions on enrichment, which it views as a red line. And as of Thursday, no official talks between the US and Iran were on the books, US officials said. In putting off a decision, Trump appears to be placing more stock in a diplomatic solution that only a day earlier he appeared to suggest was out of reach. 'I think the president has made it clear he always wants to pursue diplomacy. But believe me, the president is unafraid to use strength if necessary,' press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday after relaying Trump's new two-week timeline. 'And Iran and the entire world should know that the United States military is the strongest and most lethal fighting force in the world, and we have capabilities that no other country on this planet possesses.' In a string of Situation Room meetings over the course of this week, Trump has quizzed advisers about the likelihood US bunker-buster bombs could entirely eliminate Iran's underground nuclear facility at Fordow, and how long such an operation might last, according to people familiar with the conversations. He has insisted repeatedly he wants to avoid taking action that could devolve into a multi-year conflict, something many of his own loyalists — including his onetime top strategist Steve Bannon, with whom the president had lunch Thursday — argue would be unavoidable should he make the decision to go ahead. And while the president has seen the military options, he remains worried about a longer-term war. Any assessments on whether a strike would cause prolonged US engagement are predictive and, by their nature, not entirely satisfactory, one official said. The new, within-two-weeks time frame for talks was not universally welcomed. An Israeli intelligence official expressed dismay that Trump would not make a decision – one way or the other. 'This is not helping,' the official said. Trump will continue to convene top-level intelligence briefings over the coming days, returning to Washington early from a weekend trip to his property in New Jersey to be updated at the White House. He has relied principally on his CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine in meetings to discuss his options, according to people familiar with the matter. But at the center of the diplomatic efforts will be Witkoff, the president's friend and foreign envoy who has led negotiations meant to curb Tehran's nuclear ambitions. Witkoff began direct messaging with his Iranian counterpart, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, earlier this month and the administration has maintained some communications with Iranian officials over the past tense days as Trump weighed a strike. The plan that Witkoff last offered to Tehran would have required Iran to eventually end all uranium enrichment on its soil, and on Thursday the White House said it still views a ban on Iranian uranium enrichment as necessary to a final deal. As the Europeans head into Friday's meeting, they will be 'taking the temperature' on how receptive the Iranians are to finding a diplomatic solution, given their belief that strikes in both directions are not a solution, a European official said. European leaders believe the risks of Iran's nuclear program persist even amid Israel's strikes because Tehran maintains nuclear know-how and may still have clandestine nuclear-related efforts that won't get demolished by military strikes. Meanwhile, most US diplomats who are not in Trump's inner circle at the State Department have not been given specific guidance to offer US allies on the diplomatic efforts, a US official and a European diplomat said. That has led to many frustrating discussions with foreign interlocutors as US diplomats have very few answers to give the allies as they try to determine their diplomatic and military posture in the region, pointing only to Trump's own words. As Trump has weighed his options, Secretary of State Rubio has been close by, also departing early from the Group of 7 summit in Canada along with the commander in chief earlier this week. The top US diplomat spoke on Monday with his French, British and European Union counterparts about efforts to 'encourage a diplomatic path that ensures Iran never develops a nuclear weapon,' according to State Department readouts of the calls. On Wednesday, Rubio 'compared notes' on the matter with the Norwegian foreign minister. Rubio met with British Foreign Secretary David Lammy on Thursday before Lammy departs for the Geneva talks, and the two 'agreed Iran can never develop or acquire a nuclear weapon,' according to the State Department. 'Meeting with Secretary of State Rubio and Special Envoy to the Middle East Witkoff in the White House today, we discussed how Iran must make a deal to avoid a deepening conflict. A window now exists within the next two weeks to achieve a diplomatic solution,' Lammy said in a statement Thursday. US officials, including Witkoff, have also been actively engaged with officials in the region, many of whom have offered their help in mediating a diplomatic path forward. Multiple sources said Iran has responded to messages from third parties, but their responses have not changed. See Full Web Article
