The 1600: On the Brink

Newsweek

17-06-2025

The Insider's Track
Good morning,
Imagine being Dick Cheney right now. Your entire career dedicated to coming up with justifications for carpet bombing the Middle East. You do a pretty good job finding excuses to topple regimes across the region, even if your prediction that the US will be "greeted as liberators" never exactly comes true. But the biggest prize—Iran—eludes you. Now 20 years later, it's Donald Trump—a man you loathe so deeply you came out of your crypt to endorse a Democrat for the first time in your life—who stands on the precipice of dealing the mullahs the crippling blow you never could. Politics is funny like that.
Here's the state of play as it stands at this hour. Trump cut out of the G7 early last night to fly back to DC while urging the 10 million residents of Tehran to evacuate "before it's too late" (issuing evac orders for a foreign city is kind of a weird thing for a POTUS to do but I guess we're way past weird here). He's gathering his national security team in the Sit Room this morning, where the decision at hand appears to be: force a last-chance deal with Iran or join Israel's air campaign by delivering the bunker-busting bombs and planes that could take out Iran's main nuclear enrichment facility, known as Fordow, which is buried deep inside a mountain. Cut a deal or join the war, essentially.
That decision pits the two wings of the current GOP coalition in direct confrontation. The MAGA true believers, like Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson, who are telling Trump in no uncertain terms he cannot get us entangled in a new morass in the Mideast, that doing so would be an affront to the movement that delivered him the White House, twice.
Then there's the hawks, aka the Deep State, who still exist across the federal government, despite Trump's decade-running pledge to "drain the swamp." They're telling him he stands at a once-in-a-generation opportunity to deliver a KO to the Iranian nuclear project, and maybe even the regime itself. The country's air defenses are in tatters, its proxies are neutered. This is the moment, they're whispering in his ear. Do what Bush, McCain, Cheney, et al. never could.
If you're waking up lately feeling like you've been teleported into an alternate reality where we're running back the first George W. Bush term—mass street protests, deficit-exploding tax cuts, drumbeats of war—you're not alone.
I'm old enough to remember the election last year, when every right-wing pundit in the country was telling us Trump 2.0 represented a new kind of administration. No more wars. Focus on our own problems. America First. And yet here we are, six months in, and the world is on fire. Ukraine is an endless slaughterhouse. Gaza is a disaster and moral outrage. Israel is more emboldened than it's ever been, even during eras when the neocons were actually in charge!
The Democrats and broader anti-war movement are inert, complete non-entities. The Boomers are out there marching against a fascism that doesn't exist, rather than wars that do. And Trump is impulsive. No one knows how this breaks. I will be the first to sing the president's praises if he pulls off whatever's coming without dragging the US into a new military misadventure. But history is littered with the stories of American presidents who never recover from the decisions they make at these very moments.
Say what you will about old Joe Biden, but at least his big foreign folly was in service of trying to get us out of a war, rather than into a new one.
The Rundown
President Donald Trump said he left the G7 summit in Canada a day early for something "much bigger" than a ceasefire deal between Israel and Iran. Trump caused surprise with his early departure, with French President Emmanuel Macron later saying that he had left to broker an agreement between the warring Middle East nations. Read more.
Also happening:
Minnesota shootings: Vance Boelter sent a group text to his family members saying he "went to war" after fatally shooting Democratic Minnesota State Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband and injuring Democratic State Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, according to an FBI affidavit. Read more.
Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill": Senate lawmakers have released proposed tax changes to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, making a number of changes to the budget plan approved by the House in May. "We understand that it's a negotiation," Senate Majority Leader John Thune said. Here's how they compare.
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