4/20 Day ahead. Is weed legal in Florida? Here's what to know about marijuana laws
Get ready to see the most holy and most high celebrating this weekend — maybe just not together.
Easter Sunday and 4/20 are on the same day this year. "4/20" is cannabis culture slang for marijuana consumption, which makes April 20 (or 4/20) the designated holiday for stoners across the globe.
The holidays have coincided several times before, predating the smokers' holiday, and it will happen again in 62 years. But for celebrating 4/20, can you actually light up in Florida?
Weed, Maryjane and ganja, oh my!
Marijuana is a greenish-gray mixture of the dried flowers from the Cannabis sativa or Cannabis indica plant, according to the National Institute of Drug Use.
The main psychoactive chemical in marijuana, responsible for most of the intoxicating effects that people seek, is delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC. The chemical is found in resin produced by the leaves and buds primarily of the female cannabis plant.
The true origin of why marijuana lovers spark up on 4/20 (or even associate the time 4:20 with smoking pot) isn't clear, but there are two rumored possibilities:
The unofficial story of a group of high school students in the 1970s in California, who allegedly would meet to smoke pot every day at 4:20 p.m. However, this has never been confirmed.
According to a Vox article on the origins of the holiday, 'One common belief is that 420 was the California police or penal code for marijuana, but there's no evidence to support those claims."
No, you cannot.
Despite receiving 55.9% of votes, Amendment 3 did not achieve the 60% threshold needed to pass during the 2024 General Election. It saw 5,934,139 votes in total.
Medical marijuana is legal in Florida for residents diagnosed with a specific set of conditions who have applied for and received a Medical Marijuana ID Card or caregivers who have received a Medical Marijuana Caregiver Card.
Here are following conditions eiliglbe for and to receive a Medical Marijuana Card:
Cancer
Epilepsy
Glaucoma
HIV (human immunodeficiency virus)
AIDS (Acquired immune deficiency syndrome)
PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder)
ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis)
Crohn's disease
Parkinson's disease
Multiple sclerosis
Comparable medical conditions or status to the above
A terminal condition
Chronic nonmalignant pain
No. The state of Florida does not offer reciprocity, although a bill filed for this year's legislative session would change that if passed.
Without a Medical Marijuana Card (or Medical Marijuana Caregiver Card, for people assisting medical marijuana patients who are minors or who need help), if you are caught with pot, marijuana advocacy group NORML lists the following penalties under Florida Statutes:
Possessing 20 grams or less: first-degree misdemeanor, up to one year in jail and maximum $1,000 fine.
Possession of paraphernalia: Misdemeanor, up to one year in jail and maximum $1,000 fine.
Possessing marijuana within 1,000 feet of a school, college, park or other specified areas: Felony, mandatory three-year sentence and maximum $10,000 fine.
Possessing from 20 grams: to 25 pounds: Felony, up to five years in jail and maximum $5,000 fine.
Possessing from 25 to 2,000 pounds of marijuana: First-degree felony, from three to 15 years in jail and $25,000 fine.
Possessing from 2,000 to 10,000 pounds of marijuana: First-degree felony, from seven to 30 years and $50,000 fine.
Possessing more than 10,000 pounds of marijuana: First-degree felony, from 15 to 30 years and $200,000 fine.
However, many communities and municipalities have decriminalized possession of up to 20 grams of marijuana, meaning if you're busted you'll get a fine (which will go up each time) and you may be required to attend a drug education program or do community service.
Areas that have decriminalized pot include Alachua County, Broward County, Cocoa Beach, Hallandale Beach, Key West, Miami Beach, Miami-Dade County, Orlando, Osceola County, Palm Beach County, Port Richey, Sarasota, Tampa and Volusia County.
Only licensed medical marijuana dispensaries may sell marijuana in the state of Florida. Even if the proposed recreational amendment passes next year, you still would have to buy your pot at a licensed dispensary.
People charged with selling marijuana can face the following:
25 grams or less, without renumeration: Misdemeanor, maximum 1 year in jail, $1,000 fine.
20 grams to 25 pounds: Felony, maximum 5 years in jail, $5,000 fine.
25 to less than 2,000 pounds or 300-2,000 plants: Felony, three to 15 years, maximum $25,000 fine.
2,000 to less than 10,000 pounds or 2,000-10,000 plants: Felony, seven to 30 years, maximum $50,000 fine.
10,000 pounds or more: Felony, 15 to 30 years, maximum $200,000 fine.
If within 1,000 feet of a school, college, park, or other specified areas: An additional 3-15 years, $10,000 fine
Assorted different types of so-called "diet weed" cannabinoids such as delta-8, delta-9, delta-10 and THC-O, which are derived from hemp and not marijuana and contain lower levels of THC, are sort-of legal here under the 2018 federal Farm Bill that allows farmers to grow industrial hemp.
Last year, the Florida Legislature passed a bill, SB 1698, that effectively banned delta-8 and delta-10 products and placed a 5-milligram-delta-9 concentration limit per serving but Gov. Ron DeSantis vetoed it, reportedly to protect small businesses. However, they remain federally illegal.
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Marijuana laws in Florida 2025: What to know before 4/20 day
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Vox
a day ago
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Trump's military parade is a warning
is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. His book on democracy,, was published 0n July 16. You can purchase it here. Donald Trump's military parade in Washington this weekend — a show of force in the capital that just happens to take place on the president's birthday — smacks of authoritarian Dear Leader-style politics (even though Trump actually got the idea after attending the 2017 Bastille Day parade in Paris). Yet as disconcerting as the imagery of tanks rolling down Constitution Avenue will be, it's not even close to Trump's most insidious assault on the US military's historic and democratically essential nonpartisan ethos. In fact, it's not even the most worrying thing he's done this week. On Tuesday, the president gave a speech at Fort Bragg, an Army base home to Special Operations Command. While presidential speeches to soldiers are not uncommon — rows of uniformed troops make a great backdrop for a foreign policy speech — they generally avoid overt partisan attacks and campaign-style rhetoric. The soldiers, for their part, are expected to be studiously neutral, laughing at jokes and such, but remaining fully impassive during any policy conversation. That's not what happened at Fort Bragg. Trump's speech was a partisan tirade that targeted 'radical left' opponents ranging from Joe Biden to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. He celebrated his deployment of Marines to Los Angeles, proposed jailing people for burning the American flag, and called on soldiers to be 'aggressive' toward the protesters they encountered. The soldiers, for their part, cheered Trump and booed his enemies — as they were seemingly expected to. Reporters at a military news service, uncovered internal communications from 82nd Airborne leadership suggesting that the crowd was screened for their political opinions. 'If soldiers have political views that are in opposition to the current administration and they don't want to be in the audience then they need to speak with their leadership and get swapped out,' one note read. To call this unusual is an understatement. I spoke with four different experts on civil-military relations, two of whom teach at the Naval War College, about the speech and its implications. To a person, they said it was a step towards politicizing the military with no real precedent in modern American history. 'That is, I think, a really big red flag because it means the military's professional ethic is breaking down internally,' says Risa Brooks, a professor at Marquette University. 'Its capacity to maintain that firewall against civilian politicization may be faltering.' This may sound alarmist — like an overreading of a one-off incident — but it's part of a bigger pattern. The totality of Trump administration policies, ranging from the parade in Washington to the LA troop deployment to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's firing of high-ranking women and officers of color, suggests a concerted effort to erode the military's professional ethos and turn it into an institution subservient to the Trump administration's whims. This is a signal policy aim of would-be dictators, who wish to head off the risk of a coup and ensure the armed forces' political reliability if they are needed to repress dissent in a crisis. Steve Saideman, a professor at Carleton University, put together a list of eight different signs that a military is being politicized in this fashion. The Trump administration has exhibited six out of the eight. 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If you have an institution that controls the overwhelming bulk of weaponry in a society, it always has the physical capacity to seize control of the government at gunpoint. A key question for any government is how to convince the armed forces that they cannot or should not take power for themselves. Democracies typically do this through a process called 'professionalization.' Soldiers are rigorously taught to think of themselves as a class of public servants, people trained to perform a specific job within defined parameters. Their ultimate loyalty is not to their generals or even individual presidents, but rather to the people and the constitutional order. Samuel Huntington, the late Harvard political scientist, is the canonical theorist of a professional military. In his book The Soldier and the State, he described optimal professionalization as a system of 'objective control': one in which the military retains autonomy in how they fight and plan for wars while deferring to politicians on whether and why to fight in the first place. In effect, they stay out of the politicians' affairs while the politicians stay out of theirs. The idea of such a system is to emphasize to the military that they are professionals: Their responsibility isn't deciding when to use force, but only to conduct operations as effectively as possible once ordered to engage in them. There is thus a strict firewall between military affairs, on the one hand, and policy-political affairs on the other. Typically, the chief worry is that the military breaches this bargain: that, for example, a general starts speaking out against elected officials' policies in ways that undermine civilian control. This is not a hypothetical fear in the United States, with the most famous such example being Gen. Douglas MacArthur's insubordination during the Korean War. Thankfully, not even MacArthur attempted the worst-case version of military overstep — a coup. But in backsliding democracies like the modern United States, where the chief executive is attempting an anti-democratic power grab, the military poses a very different kind of threat to democracy — in fact, something akin to the exact opposite of the typical scenario. In such cases, the issue isn't the military inserting itself into politics but rather the civilians dragging them into it in ways that upset the democratic political order. The worst-case scenario is that the military acts on presidential directives to use force against domestic dissenters, destroying democracy not by ignoring civilian orders, but by following them. There are two ways to arrive at such a worst-case scenario, both of which are in evidence in the early days of Trump 2.0. First is politicization: an intentional attack on the constraints against partisan activity inside the professional ranks. Many of Pete Hegseth's major moves as secretary of defense fit this bill, including his decisions to fire nonwhite and female generals seen as politically unreliable and his effort to undermine the independence of the military's lawyers. The breaches in protocol at Fort Bragg are both consequences and causes of politicization: They could only happen in an environment of loosened constraint, and they might encourage more overt political action if gone unpunished. The second pathway to breakdown is the weaponization of professionalism against itself. Here, Trump exploits the military's deference to politicians by ordering it to engage in undemocratic (and even questionably legal) activities. In practice, this looks a lot like the LA deployments, and, more specifically, the lack of any visible military pushback. While the military readily agreeing to deployments is normally a good sign — that civilian control is holding — these aren't normal times. And this isn't a normal deployment, but rather one that comes uncomfortably close to the military being ordered to assist in repressing overwhelmingly peaceful demonstrations against executive abuses of power. 'It's really been pretty uncommon to use the military for law enforcement,' says David Burbach, another Naval War College professor (also speaking personally). 'This is really bringing the military into frontline law enforcement when. … these are really not huge disturbances.' This, then, is the crisis: an incremental and slow-rolling effort by the Trump administration to erode the norms and procedures designed to prevent the military from being used as a tool of domestic repression. Is it time to panic? 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Soldiers are not unthinking automatons: While they are trained to follow commands, they are explicitly obligated to refuse illegal orders, even coming from the president. The more aggressive Trump's efforts to use the military as a tool of repression gets, the more likely there is to be resistance. Or, at least theoretically. The truth is that we don't really know how the US military will respond to a situation like this. Like so many of Trump's second-term policies, their efforts to bend the military to their will are unprecedented — actions with no real parallel in the modern history of the American military. Experts can only make informed guesses, based on their sense of US military culture as well as comparisons to historical and foreign cases. For this reason, there are probably only two things we can say with confidence. First, what we've seen so far is not yet sufficient evidence to declare that the military is in Trump's thrall. 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Vox
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The Israel-Iran war hinges on three big things
is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. His book on democracy,, was published 0n July 16. You can purchase it here. Last night, Israel went to war with Iran — launching a bombing raid targeting Iran's senior military leadership and top nuclear scientists. The strikes were a tactical triumph for Israel: The heads of both Iran's entire military and its Revolutionary Guards were killed in the opening hours, and Iranian air defenses took a massive hit. Israel suffered few, if any, losses and suffered no immediate major retaliation. But on Friday afternoon, Iran launched a barrage of missiles across Israel that overwhelmed Israel's Iron Dome defenses. While the full scope of the counterattack is not yet clear, it underscores that in this war — as in any other — there's far too much we don't know in the early days to be confident about predicting how things end. Israeli officials are saying the strikes will continue for days, if not weeks — essentially a commitment to open-ended regional war for the foreseeable future. It's nearly impossible, at this stage, to truly understand what's happening. 'We know from history the full impact of Israel's attack on Iran will take years to unfold. It could prevent an Iranian bomb or ensure one. It could destabilize the [Iranian] regime or entrench it,' writes Karim Sadjadpour, an expert on Iran at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. There are, I think, at least three key questions that will play a major role in determining the outcome of this conflict. They are: Is the Israeli objective limited to demolishing Iran's nuclear program, as they've said, or is this also a regime change operation? To what extent does Iran have the capability to hit back? How does this affect Iran's thinking about getting a nuclear bomb? All of these are, at this point, unanswerable. But trying to assess what we do know can help clarify what to look for when trying to figure out the implications of the past day's events. What is Israel's objective? For several decades, Israel has described Iran's nuclear program as an existential threat to its survival. It was never fully clear if Iran was committed to getting a nuclear weapon or merely wanted the capability to acquire one quickly if it felt threatened. But the steps — like building centrifuges that could produce highly enriched uranium — are identical up until the very last minute, when it's arguably too late to stop by force. From the Israeli point of view, a theocratic regime that sponsors terrorist groups that kill Israelis — like Hamas and Hezbollah — simply could not be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon. For this reason, Israel has been threatening airstrikes on Iran's nuclear program for several decades. Last night, Israel made good on that threat. Israeli officials have described the attacks as prompted by an 'imminent' threat of Iranian nuclear development, with one such official telling the BBC that it could have built bombs 'within days.' Israel's position is that Iran's nuclear development left them no choice in the matter: that it was facing a choice between striking now or staring down a nuclear-armed Iran in the immediate future. We don't yet know how true those claims are (and we may never). But what we do know is that there is some tension between the Israeli justification for the strikes and the actual targets they hit. Any effort to cripple Iran's nuclear program would focus heavily on two targets: the nuclear enrichment facilities at Natanz and Fordow. While Israel did target Iranian nuclear scientists, the physical facilities do not appear to have been taken out. Israel hit Natanz, but early expert assessments suggest only limited damage. And there is no evidence, at least publicly, that Fordow was hit in the opening round at all. So if the true target is the nuclear program, why did Israel expend so much effort targeting Iran's ballistic missile capabilities and military leadership while doing relatively little damage to nuclear infrastructure? There are, broadly speaking, two answers to this question. The first is that Israel plans to hit the nuclear facilities harder as the war goes on. By killing Iran's military leadership — including nearly its entire air command — Israel has weakened Iran's ability to defend its airspace and retaliate against the Israeli homeland. These first strikes, on this theory, were laying the groundwork for later strikes more focused on nuclear facilities. 'The entire operation really has to be completed with the elimination of Fordow,' Michael Leiter, Israel's ambassador to the US, said in a Friday interview on Fox News. The second interpretation is that Israel has even bigger plans. It will heavily target the nuclear facilities, to be sure, but it will also engage in a wider campaign to undermine the very foundations of the Iranian regime. By taking out key leaders, Israel is weakening the Iranian government's ability to maintain its grip on power. The ultimate Israeli hope would be that these strikes have a similar effect in Iran as Israel's devastating strikes on Hezbollah did in Syria — damaging the government's ability to repress so severely that it creates space for domestic opponents to topple it. 'The targets that were hit made it clear that Israel's goal was broader than damaging Iran's nuclear program,' Steven Cook, a Middle East expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, writes in Foreign Policy. 'The Israelis are clearly not satisfied with doing damage to Iran's nuclear program but seem to be engaged in regime change.' There is, in short, little doubt that Israel will heavily target the nuclear facilities in the coming days. That alone could produce significant bloodshed. But if Israel's ambitions are wider — nuclear demolition plus regime change — then we could be in for a much longer, deadlier, and riskier campaign. Can Iran fight back? For many years, the conventional wisdom among Middle East analysts has been that Israel will pay a very high price for striking Iran. Iran is a very large country — bigger in population than Germany, France, and Britain — that has invested heavily in its military. It retains a large ballistic missile arsenal and an extensive network of proxy militias around the Middle East, all of which could be turned on Israel with deadly effect. Iran's Friday afternoon missile barrage suggests it retains at least some capability to fight back. But how much? Since the October 7, 2023 attacks Israel has been systematically demolishing Iran's proxy network. The brutal war in Gaza has forced Hamas to basically go underground, fighting more like an insurgent group than a mini-state capable of firing major rocket barrages at Israeli cities. A series of surprise attacks on Hezbollah's leadership in September of last year devastated the Lebanese group, to the point where it has been forced to sit out the current round of fighting. And Israel has repeatedly struck Iranian interests around the Middle East — including a major assault on its homeland air defenses in October 2024 — while paying a relatively low price. An Iranian missile-and-drone attack targeting Israel in April of last year, launched in retaliation for an attack on its embassy in Damascus, did scarcely any damage. Once again, there are basically two possible interpretations of events. The first is that Iran is now a paper tiger. By destroying its proxies, and exposing its own retaliatory capabilities to be vastly overstated, Israel has created a situation where it can attack Iran with relative impunity. The Iranians will certainly try and retaliate as they did on Friday, but it will be relatively weak — doing only limited damage to Israeli targets. The second is that Iran has been holding back. While Iran may hate Israel, it has not (under this telling of its events) seen a full-blown war as in its interests. For that reason, it has been reserving its most devastating weapons — and those of its remaining allies, like the Houthis in Yemen or Iraqi militias — in order to avoid escalation. Now that escalation is clearly there, Iran will no longer restrain itself — and the long-anticipated devastating response will happen in the coming days. Such an attack would go beyond Israeli military targets and hit the country's cities, attempt to shut down shipping through the critical Strait of Hormuz, and potentially even kill American personnel in the region. Once again, we cannot yet be sure which of these two scenarios is more likely. There's also a lot of possible space between the two extremes, in which Iran retaliates forcefully against Israel but not quite so aggressively against the US or transport ships as pre-war estimates feared. But we can be certain that the scope of the conflict, including any risk that the US might be dragged in, will be determined in large part by whether Iran is truly weak or has simply seemed that way. How does Iran think about the bomb after this? It is, as a technical matter, impossible to permanently prevent a country from building a nuclear bomb in a single attack. Whatever gets destroyed can eventually be rebuilt if the targeted government is truly committed to acquiring a weapon. This fact has been a centerpiece of the case against bombing Iran, an argument focusing less on whether Israel could damage Iranian infrastructure than whether doing so would accomplish anything in the long run. Israel cannot, by force alone, remove Iran's will to build a bomb. So even if Israel does serious damage to Natanz and Fordow — a real 'if,' given Fordow's extensive fortifications — it can't stop the Iranians from repairing it without launching another strike in the future. Moreover, a successful Israeli attack would solidify Iran's interest in acquiring a nuclear deterrent, meaning that Iran would invest huge amounts of resources in a nuclear rebuild as soon as the bombs stopped falling. On this logic, one Israeli strike commits Israel to a forever war: bombing Iran at regular intervals to prevent it from reconstituting its program. We are now about to see a test of this argument — one with at least three possible outcomes. The first is that it is correct. Israel does real damage to Iran's nuclear facilities, but in the process it convinces Iran that it needs to build a bomb in order to deter future Israeli aggression. This is what happened after Israel's 1981 strike on Iraq's nuclear facility at Osirak, which caused Saddam Hussein's decision to double down on nuclear development (a program only truly derailed by the 1992 Gulf War and subsequent nuclear inspections). The second is that Israel is more effective than its critics believe. Perhaps Israel does so much damage to Iran's nuclear facilities that the Iranians calculate the risk/reward benefit of rebuilding them is simply too unfavorable. Or perhaps the regime change operation succeeds and the new Iranian government decides not to antagonize the world by recommitting to a nuclear program. The third is that Iran's nuclear facilities suffer far less damage during the war than people anticipate — and Iran moves swiftly to build a bomb before Israel would be ready to stop them. This may sound implausible given Israel's successes so far. But expert assessments suggest that, for all its military weakness, it's possible Iran has done a better job shielding its weapons program than it seems. 'Iran already has enough highly enriched uranium to build several nuclear weapons. This is containerized and believed to be stored at three different locations, and it is unclear whether Israel will be able to get all of it in the ongoing military strikes,' Ken Pollack, the vice president for policy at the Middle East Institute, writes in Foreign Affairs. 'Israeli and other Western intelligence services may have a very hard time finding new, secret Iranian nuclear sites. It may also have trouble destroying those sites even if they are identified, since Iran will likely harden them even beyond the level of its current facilities.' How fast depends on the extent of the damage. But Fabian Hoffmann, a fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis think tank, suggests that it could 'reach weapons-grade enrichment levels relatively quickly' so long as 'anything substantial survives.'
Vox
2 days ago
- Vox
Will the US get drawn into the Israel-Iran war?
is a senior correspondent at Vox covering foreign policy and world news with a focus on the future of international conflict. He is the author of the 2018 book, Invisible Countries: Journeys to the Edge of Nationhood , an exploration of border conflicts, unrecognized countries, and changes to the world map. In announcing Israel's strikes against Iran's military leadership and nuclear program last night, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made the case that Israel had 'no choice but to act, and act now' in response to recent advances in Iran's capabilities that put his country at risk of a 'nuclear holocaust.' It's far from clear that the Trump administration shared Netanyahu's sense of urgency. President Donald Trump waved off Israeli plans for a strike in April, amid ongoing efforts to negotiate a new deal over Tehran's nuclear program. Just hours before the attack was launched, Trump still seemed committed to the diplomatic path, saying he would 'rather that [the Israelis] don't go in in order not to ruin it.' One of the biggest questions in the days to come — and perhaps the one with the highest stakes for Israel — is whether Trump will come to embrace the war he publicly opposed. Initially, reporting on the lead-up to the attack suggested that the Trump administration was aware the attack was coming but did little to stop it. The first high-level US response to the strikes, from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, was relatively noncommittal, stating that the Israelis 'believe this action was necessary' but that the US was 'not involved in strikes against Iran.' On Friday morning, however, Trump seemed more enthusiastic about the strikes, posting that he had warned Iranian leaders of the consequences of making a deal but that they 'couldn't get it done.' He added, 'the United States makes the best and most lethal military equipment anywhere in the World, BY FAR, and that Israel has a lot of it.' This appears to be a case of Trump associating himself after the fact with what appears to be a remarkably successful military operation. The hope in the Trump administration seems to be that the Israeli operation will force Iran to make concessions at the negotiating table. Trump urged Iranian leaders to take a deal 'BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE,' and US officials reportedly still hoped that planned talks in Oman on Sunday will still go ahead. A meeting on Sunday, at least, seems unlikely. Iran has threatened retaliation for the strikes and made clear that it doesn't believe Washington's disavowals of involvement. Netanyahu's government is also clearly hoping for a more active US role. 'The president seems to still hope that his preference for a diplomatic solution can be salvaged,' said Nimrod Novik, a former foreign policy adviser to the Israeli government. 'Few in the political-security establishment here share that hope.' He added: 'From an Israeli vantage point, it seems that the better the operation looks, the more Trump wants to own it.' The question in the days to come is just how long the US will stay on the sidelines. How the American role in the conflict could escalate According to the New York Times, the Israeli attack plan that Trump rejected in April, 'would have required U.S. help not just to defend Israel from Iranian retaliation, but also to ensure that an Israeli attack was successful, making the United States a central part of the attack itself.' The conventional wisdom has long been that a military strike to destroy or seriously degrade Iran's nuclear enrichment capability would require US involvement: Iran's key enrichment sites are located in fortified facilities deep underground, and destroying them would require heavy bunker-buster bombs. Israel doesn't have those bombs or the heavy bombers required to carry them, but the US does. But that's not the approach Israel took, at least initially. Analysts say Israel does not appear to have struck the most heavily fortified compound at Fordow, or its nuclear site at Isfahan. A third key nuclear enrichment site, Natanz, sustained only light damage. Instead, Israel's strikes targeted Iran's top leadership, including the commander in chief of its military and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and prominent nuclear scientists. Several military bases around Tehran were hit, as well as air defense systems. 'This was not a campaign against Iranian nuclear facilities,' said Nicole Grajewski, an expert on the Iranian nuclear program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 'This was a campaign against Iranian command and control and leadership.' This was, however, just the opening salvo of a campaign that Netanyahu said 'will continue for as many days as it takes to remove this threat.' The operation's aims could very well expand. 'This is day one,' noted Raphael Cohen, a military analyst at the RAND Corporation. 'On day 20, day 40, day 60, once everything drags on as stockpiles dwindle, that's when we're going to start to see to what extent Israel needs the United States.' How will Iran respond? Iran fired at least 100 drones at Israel on Friday, which, so far, appear to have been intercepted without causing any damage. Notably, it has not yet fired ballistic missiles, its most potent long-range threat. The Iranian leadership is likely still reeling from the losses it sustained. Its capacity to respond is likely also hampered by Israel's success over the past year and a half against Iran's network of proxies across the Middle East. Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based militia that was once the most powerful of these proxies, but was decimated by last year's pager bombings, has been notably quiet so far, in contrast to the wide-ranging rocket barrage it launched immediately after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks. Iran fired missile barrages at Israel twice last year, first in April in response to the bombing of the Iranian embassy in Damascus, and a second, much larger barrage in October in response to the killing of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders in Tehran. Neither caused extensive damage, though in the October strikes, Israeli air defenses were overwhelmed in some places, suggesting that a larger strike could cause serious damage. Iran may have as many as 2,000 ballistic missiles at its disposal, and Trump's Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff reportedly warned senators last week that Iranian retaliation could cause a 'mass casualty event.' 'In October, you saw more advanced ballistic missiles being used, but not like the full suite of Iranian ballistic missiles,' Grajewski told Vox. She also noted that during both strikes last year, Israel needed international support to successfully repel those attacks, notably help from the US military in shooting down missiles as well as intelligence support from a previously unlikely alliance of Arab countries sharing intelligence. Though the Trump administration was perfectly willing to cut a quick deal with Yemen's Houthi rebels, despite the group continuing to periodically launch missiles and drones at Israel, a massive attack of the type Witkoff warned is a different story. Israeli policymakers are likely counting on the Trump administration to assist in mounting the kind of multilayered defense that the US did under Joe Biden last year. Could Iran attack Americans? Iranian leaders are plainly not buying US disavowals of involvement in Israel's operation. Military commanders had warned that US forces in the Middle East could be exposed to attack in retaliation for such a strike. In the days leading up to the attack, the US partially evacuated its embassy in Baghdad and authorized the departure of personnel and families from other sites in the region due to that risk. Iran has generally been very wary about taking steps that could draw the US into a direct conflict, preferring to act through proxies. This would suggest a direct strike on US facilities or a drastic move likely blocking the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, which could cause a spike in global energy prices, is unlikely. Attacks by one of Iran's proxy militias in Iran, or a resumption of strikes against US ships by the Houthis, seem somewhat more likely. On the other hand, we may simply be in uncharted waters where the previous rules of restraint don't apply. The Iranian government will almost certainly feel it has to mount some significant response, if only for its own credibility. There have already been some reports of civilian casualties–if those increase, the need to respond will only grow. For Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 'there's a personal element,' said Alex Vatanka, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. 'How do you get yourself out of the situation without being entirely humiliated? … Is he going to do what Qaddafi did and give up his nuclear program, or is he going to say, you know, what, to hell with it, I'd rather die. I'd rather seek martyrdom. It remains to be seen.' How much has Trump changed? Khamenei isn't the only leader whose motives are something of a mystery at the moment. During his first term, Trump authorized the strike that killed senior Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani, a major provocation, but also called off a planned strike on Iranian soil due to concerns about escalation. During his second term, he has been surprisingly unconcerned about coordinating with Israel — cutting deals with the Houthis as well as launching nuclear talks with Iran that Netanyahu was highly skeptical of from the start. His administration this time includes some notably less hawkish voices when it comes to Iran, such as Vice President JD Vance, who has warned against letting Israel drag the US into a war, and described it as a scenario that could 'balloon into World War III.' In 24 hours, Trump has gone from publicly opposing an Israeli strike to taking at least partial credit for it. Netanyahu, who has been advocating an operation like this for years, is likely hoping that continued military success will prompt Trump to abandon his hopes of a big, beautiful deal and join the fight.
