THE MIDDLE EAST

Israel launches all-out war on Iran, striking its nuclear sites and killing its commanders

In a massive surprise assault, Israel struck Iran's nuclear facilities, air defences and military leadership, killing top generals and nuclear scientists. Iran fired back with waves of missiles. The direct war between the two, long feared, has finally, fully begun.

Israel launched a sweeping surprise attack on Iran on June 13, striking nuclear facilities, missile sites, air defences and military command centres across the country, and killing in the opening hours much of Iran's senior military leadership and several of its nuclear scientists in an operation it called Rising Lion. It was the most direct and ambitious assault Israel has ever mounted on Iran, aimed, it said, at destroying or crippling the nuclear programme it insists is nearing a weapon, and it marked the transition of the two nations' decades-long shadow war into open, full-scale conflict. Iran, reeling from the decapitation of its command, retaliated with waves of ballistic missiles at Israeli cities, some penetrating Israel's defences and killing civilians, as the region braced for a war whose ceiling no one could see and whose potential to draw in the United States, and to convulse the global economy through the oil markets, was immediate and grave.

The war that this paper has watched the Middle East edge toward for nearly two years had arrived in its most dangerous form. The questions cascaded: whether Israel could actually destroy Iran's nuclear programme from the air, or only delay it while guaranteeing Iran's determination to build the bomb it had been struck for approaching; whether the United States would join; whether Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz and send oil prices soaring; whether the conflict would pull in Iran's proxies and the whole region. Two years of escalation, of the ladder climbed rung by rung, of each side taking the next locally-necessary step, had led here, to open war between Israel and Iran, and the world watched the opening days with the particular dread of a catastrophe long foreseen and now, despite every warning, arrived.

AMERICA

Troops in the streets of Los Angeles, over a governor's objection

The rule-of-law confrontation reached a new and dangerous stage as President Trump deployed the military onto American streets against the wishes of a state's elected leaders. After immigration raids in Los Angeles sparked protests, Trump federalised California's National Guard on June 7 and then sent active-duty Marines to the city on June 9, over the furious objection of Governor Gavin Newsom, who called it an authoritarian provocation and sued to stop it, an extraordinary spectacle of a president deploying the armed forces domestically against a state's will. It came days before a vast military parade through Washington on June 14, ostensibly for the Army's 250th anniversary and coinciding with the president's birthday, which drew nationwide "No Kings" protests against what many saw as the trappings of a strongman.

IN BRIEF

A partnership explodes; a plane falls; a lawmaker murdered

The alliance between the world's most powerful man and its richest ended in spectacular public warfare, as Elon Musk and Donald Trump turned on each other in a furious exchange of insults and threats, Musk claiming the president appeared in the secret Epstein files, the president threatening Musk's government contracts, and tens of billions briefly wiped from Tesla's value. An Air India Boeing 787 bound for London crashed seconds after taking off from Ahmedabad on June 12, killing more than 260 people in the deadliest aviation disaster in a decade, with a single survivor. And in Minnesota, a gunman impersonating a police officer assassinated a Democratic state lawmaker and her husband and gravely wounded another legislator, a chilling act of political violence.

The Column

The enemy within is always someone

A president put the army on the streets of an American city this fortnight, over its own elected leaders, while abroad another war opened against Iran. The two are one story. A state at war outward has always needed an enemy inward, and the enemy is never discovered. It is manufactured, from whoever is available.

By Zainab Zaheer

This fortnight the president ordered soldiers into an American city over the objection of its elected government, and across the world Israel opened all-out war on Iran, and these look like two separate stories, the domestic and the foreign, but they are the same story told at two scales, and the connective tissue between them is a single ancient mechanism: that a polity mobilised for war outward requires, and therefore produces, an enemy within. The troops in the city are not a response to a discovered threat. They are the domestic face of a war footing, and the threat they answer is one the war footing itself calls into being, because that is what war footings do.

Carl Schmitt, the most dangerous political theorist of the last century precisely because he was right about the thing he was evil about, defined the political itself as the distinction between friend and enemy, and argued that a state coheres, finds its unity and its intensity, by naming an enemy against which the friends are gathered. What Schmitt described admiringly, as the essence of sovereignty, I describe with horror, as its pathology: that power under strain reaches, almost automatically, for an enemy to define itself against, and that when the external enemy is distant, an internal one is required to make the threat feel present, to convert the abstract war abroad into a concrete danger at home that justifies the soldier on the corner. The enemy within is not a fact that states discover. It is a function that states require, and the identity of the enemy is almost incidental, filled by whoever is available, marginal, and already half-suspected: the migrant, the protester, the minority, the city that voted the wrong way.

The counterargument is real and I will not dodge it: sometimes there is actual disorder, actual violence, actual threat, and a state has a genuine duty to keep order, and to treat every deployment of force as manufactured paranoia is to deny that public safety is ever a real concern and to make oneself absurd the first time a riot is not imaginary. I grant it completely. Disorder can be real; the duty to protect is real; not every troop movement is a Reichstag fire. But the test is not whether some disorder exists, because some disorder always exists, somewhere, sufficient to be pointed at; the test is the proportion between the threat and the response, and the direction the response travels. When the force vastly exceeds the disorder, when it is aimed at a city's own elected government, when it coincides with a war opening abroad and a rhetoric of enemies everywhere, then the disorder is not the cause but the pretext, the available raw material from which the required internal enemy is being manufactured. The threat is real in the trivial sense that some broken window exists; it is manufactured in the sense that matters, which is that it is being inflated into a justification it cannot honestly bear.

I know the far end of this mechanism because my own people have been its raw material for a quarter of a century, the available enemy within, conscripted into that role not because of anything we did but because a state at war abroad needed a face for the danger at home and ours was to hand. I have watched the friend-enemy line drawn straight through my community, watched ordinary people converted into a standing suspicion, watched the wars in distant countries reach back to license the surveillance, the suspicion, the soldier's glance, in the airports and neighbourhoods of countries at peace. So I recognise the machinery operating this fortnight not as a theory but as a thing I have lived inside, and I recognise its universality: today the available enemy is the migrant and the dissenting city, yesterday it was my coreligionists, tomorrow it will be whoever is marginal enough to be plausible and weak enough to be safe.

That is the warning I want to leave, and it is not addressed to the enemy of the moment but to everyone watching who feels safely outside the category. The friend-enemy machine does not stop at its first target, because its function is not to neutralise a particular threat but to supply the internal enemy that a war footing perpetually demands, and its appetite renews. Whoever is available this fortnight is available because they are marginal, and margins move. The soldier on the corner of another man's city is not there for a reason that will stay confined to that city, or that enemy, or that war. He is there because the state has decided it needs an enemy within, and a state that has decided it needs one will never, ever run out of candidates. It will simply, when the current enemy is exhausted, find the next available someone, and the only question that has ever mattered is how long you have before it is you.

The Ledger

The war between Israel and Iran, both wielding drones, missiles and cyberweapons, is another laboratory of the new warfare; the AI-and-autonomy arms race accelerates in the world's conflicts even as its governance stalls in the world's capitals.

Data centers & power

The Israel-Iran war threatens the oil markets and the Strait of Hormuz, through which much of the world's energy flows, a reminder that the power question underlying the AI build-out is entangled with a Middle East now at open war.

Rates

Oil prices spiked on the war's outbreak, threatening a fresh inflationary shock atop the tariff turmoil; the Fed, holding, confronts yet another supply-side threat its tools cannot address.

Real estate

US 30-year mortgage 6.84 percent (June 12). Range-bound; the domestic market's strange calm persists amid war abroad and troops in American streets.

India tech

The Air India crash is a devastating blow, the country's worst air disaster in a decade, and a grim test of its aviation-safety systems; the technology and services sector, deeply tied to global aviation and travel, mourns alongside the nation.

What we called wrong

Nothing to retract. The Israel-Iran war is the culmination of the escalation this paper has tracked since October 2023, arrived at exactly as the escalation-ladder front page of No. 47 described: rung by locally-necessary rung, toward a war few actually chose.

The Back Page

Two hundred and sixty

An Air India Boeing 787, bound for London, rose from the runway at Ahmedabad on the afternoon of June 12, climbed for a few seconds, and then, impossibly, began to descend, coming down onto a medical college hostel in a residential neighbourhood and erupting into flame, killing more than 260 people, almost everyone aboard and many on the ground, in the worst aviation disaster India has seen in decades. There was one survivor, a man seated by an emergency exit who walked out of the wreckage, an escape so improbable it will be studied for years. The investigators will spend months on the cause, the systems, the seconds, the exact sequence of a catastrophe that took a modern airliner out of the sky moments after a routine takeoff. But this page is not for the analysis; it is for the 260. For the families flying home to London and the families in the hostel below who never left the ground. For the newlyweds and the students and the grandparents and the children, the whole ordinary human cargo of a scheduled flight on an ordinary afternoon, gone in the time it takes to read this sentence. India has had a hard fortnight, a war on its border averted, a crash in its skies not. A nation that has spent this decade reaching for the sky, to the Moon, to the frontier of technology, was reminded this fortnight of the oldest and most terrible fragility, that the same physics that lifts a plane can drop it, and that behind every aviation statistic is a departure lounge full of people who thought they were simply going somewhere. Two hundred and sixty of them, on a Thursday afternoon, were not.