When facing allegations of bad behavior, are there red lines for politicians?
In states from Maine to California to Texas this year, candidates for political office have suspended campaigns – and in some cases resigned from office – over allegations of sexual assault or misconduct. Yet other officeholders facing similar accusations have remained on the ballot or have won elections.
Democrat Graham Platner dropped his U.S. Senate campaign in Maine last week, under pressure from party leaders and former allies, after a sexual assault allegation from an ex-girlfriend emerged. From the early days of his campaign Mr. Platner faced controversies over online comments about women and what previous partners said was intimidating behavior in relationships.
Earlier this year, Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell of California and GOP Rep. Tony Gonzales of Texas both suspended political campaigns and resigned from the U.S. House over similar allegations.
Why We Wrote This
In the post-#MeToo era accusations of sexual misconduct have increased. But while some politicians have ended their campaigns or resigned, others have survived such allegations, raising questions about how voters evaluate charges and the impact of partisanship.
In the post-#MeToo era accusations of sexual misconduct have increased, as taboos around coming forward have lessened. Still, some politicians continue to survive such allegations, raising questions about how voters evaluate charges of bad behavior, the impact of partisanship, and whether there are certain red lines that candidates can’t cross without losing support.
President Donald Trump was first elected in 2016 after voters learned of his lewd comments on camera about grabbing women. He won reelection in 2024 after a previous affair with a porn star had been revealed and a jury in a civil case had found him liable for sexual abuse against columnist E. Jean Carroll. But Mr. Trump may be the exception more than the rule, and the red line for him isn’t necessarily the same as for other politicians.
Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/AP/File
Experts say the standards are often situation-dependent. Voters broadly do care about the moral character of leaders, but that concern is often filtered through a partisan lens, which impacts how they judge the seriousness or veracity of the accusations. Voters also sometimes take into consideration how the candidates’ conduct may affect their chances of winning, prioritizing their party’s success over a given candidate’s character.
At the end of the day, candidates need support from their party and trust from their base, says Jennifer Lawless, chair of the politics department at the University of Virginia.
”In a court of law, you’re innocent until you’re proven guilty. On the campaign trail, everything is fair game,” she says. “If you have behaved poorly, or if there are people who allege that you behaved poorly, and you can’t refute those allegations, you’re not entitled to anything.”
Mr. Platner has denied the assault allegations against him. Mr. Trump has denied wrongdoing against Ms. Carroll, but has been unsuccessful in his efforts to appeal the judgment. A federal judge last week said he must make a long-delayed $5 million payment to her, based on the 2023 verdict.
In recent years, reports of sexual misconduct have increased – including against politicians. The #MeToo campaign of the 2010s was a watershed moment for accountability that encouraged survivors of abuse to come forward and raised awareness of common responses to assault, including delayed reporting. Later, some criticized the movement for overreaching, saying innocent men were falsely accused and tried in the court of public opinion.
Surveys show the U.S. public broadly cares about political leaders’ personal morality. But as a 2022 YouGov poll found, it’s common for people to view officials from their own party as virtuous and those from the rival party as flawed. And today’s heightened partisanship means voters are more likely to excuse behavior on their own side of the aisle that used to be considered nonnegotiable.
“We are so polarized at this point as a country that in both parties, people are willing to swallow behavior that they might not ordinarily be willing to swallow,” says Professor Lawless. “The question then becomes: What are you willing to stomach if it means electing somebody of your own party as opposed to helping somebody on the other side of the aisle?”
Rich Pedroncelli/AP/File
Since the height of #MeToo, the mentality of “believe women” has grown more cautious, says Michael J. Willemin, a partner at Wigdor law firm in New York. But the number of accusations hasn’t lessened, he says. And there’s been an increase “in understanding that someone doesn’t always come forward immediately.”
In Mr. Platner’s case, the latest allegation led to a quick collapse. After Mr. Platner’s ex-girlfriend said he had sexually assaulted her in 2021, he began losing support in a matter of hours, including endorsements from Democratic politicians and the Maine Democratic Party, which called for him to drop out of the race two days before he officially suspended his campaign.
Mr. Platner had already weathered a series of scandals, from a Nazi-themed tattoo to controversial Reddit posts, along with other accusations of misbehavior from former girlfriends.
“With Platner, this wasn’t just one person coming forward to try and ruin a political campaign right before Election Day,” says Professor Lawless. “This was a steady stream of allegations across a broad array of months and incidents.”
The National Women’s Defense League has found that 40% of officeholders resign following sexual misconduct allegations. But of the 60% who do not, many wind up winning reelection – 80% at the state level and 93% at the congressional level.
“It doesn’t seem to be disqualifying yet,” says Emma Davidson Tribbs, NWDL founding director.
In the current cycle, two dozen people in state governments and Congress who have been accused of sexual harassment or assault are running for reelection, she says.
Most of the time, leaders in each party play a role in deciding which candidates stay in a race, even though the national parties are relatively weak and have been unable to control who makes it through the primary system.
“The party apparatus drives all of it,” says Professor Lawless. “The reality is … if the party’s money dries up and the party’s connections to sophisticated wealthy donors dry up, it’s impossible to run.”
The political questions are separate from the legal questions. Laws vary from state to state and among legislative bodies. Some lawmakers say that Congress, which passed reforms after the biggest wave of #MeToo cases, needs stronger accountability measures and protections against retaliation.
Mariam Zuhaib/AP/File
Following the resignations of Mr. Swalwell and Mr. Gonzales, there was a bipartisan push for sharper consequences. Republican Rep. Nancy Mace was among 65 lawmakers from both parties who pushed unsuccessfully for the House Ethics Committee to make public all reports on allegations of congressional sexual misconduct. She and some others have called for the resignation of fellow Republican Rep. Cory Mills who has faced – and denied – allegations of violence against women.
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The directors of NWDL say, it’s not just up to voters; it’s also about whether institutions are structured in a way that prevents and polices abuse. That can start with anti-retaliation laws and transparency efforts to ensure voters know if lawmakers are facing accusations.
“The culture runs right into Congress, right off the campaigns,” says Sarah Higginbotham, a co-founder of NWDL. “If we can reform the institution itself, where we have these really strong levers, that’s part of the conversation.”
When facing allegations of bad behavior, are there red lines for politicians?
In states from Maine to California to Texas this year, candidates for political office have suspended campaigns – and in some cases resigned from office – over allegations of sexual assault or misconduct. Yet other officeholders facing similar accusations have remained on the ballot or have won elections.
Democrat Graham Platner dropped his U.S. Senate campaign in Maine last week, under pressure from party leaders and former allies, after a sexual assault allegation from an ex-girlfriend emerged. From the early days of his campaign Mr. Platner faced controversies over online comments about women and what previous partners said was intimidating behavior in relationships.
Earlier this year, Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell of California and GOP Rep. Tony Gonzales of Texas both suspended political campaigns and resigned from the U.S. House over similar allegations.
Why We Wrote This
In the post-#MeToo era accusations of sexual misconduct have increased. But while some politicians have ended their campaigns or resigned, others have survived such allegations, raising questions about how voters evaluate charges and the impact of partisanship.
In the post-#MeToo era accusations of sexual misconduct have increased, as taboos around coming forward have lessened. Still, some politicians continue to survive such allegations, raising questions about how voters evaluate charges of bad behavior, the impact of partisanship, and whether there are certain red lines that candidates can’t cross without losing support.
President Donald Trump was first elected in 2016 after voters learned of his lewd comments on camera about grabbing women. He won reelection in 2024 after a previous affair with a porn star had been revealed and a jury in a civil case had found him liable for sexual abuse against columnist E. Jean Carroll. But Mr. Trump may be the exception more than the rule, and the red line for him isn’t necessarily the same as for other politicians.
Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/AP/File
Experts say the standards are often situation-dependent. Voters broadly do care about the moral character of leaders, but that concern is often filtered through a partisan lens, which impacts how they judge the seriousness or veracity of the accusations. Voters also sometimes take into consideration how the candidates’ conduct may affect their chances of winning, prioritizing their party’s success over a given candidate’s character.
At the end of the day, candidates need support from their party and trust from their base, says Jennifer Lawless, chair of the politics department at the University of Virginia.
”In a court of law, you’re innocent until you’re proven guilty. On the campaign trail, everything is fair game,” she says. “If you have behaved poorly, or if there are people who allege that you behaved poorly, and you can’t refute those allegations, you’re not entitled to anything.”
Mr. Platner has denied the assault allegations against him. Mr. Trump has denied wrongdoing against Ms. Carroll, but has been unsuccessful in his efforts to appeal the judgment. A federal judge last week said he must make a long-delayed $5 million payment to her, based on the 2023 verdict.
In recent years, reports of sexual misconduct have increased – including against politicians. The #MeToo campaign of the 2010s was a watershed moment for accountability that encouraged survivors of abuse to come forward and raised awareness of common responses to assault, including delayed reporting. Later, some criticized the movement for overreaching, saying innocent men were falsely accused and tried in the court of public opinion.
Surveys show the U.S. public broadly cares about political leaders’ personal morality. But as a 2022 YouGov poll found, it’s common for people to view officials from their own party as virtuous and those from the rival party as flawed. And today’s heightened partisanship means voters are more likely to excuse behavior on their own side of the aisle that used to be considered nonnegotiable.
“We are so polarized at this point as a country that in both parties, people are willing to swallow behavior that they might not ordinarily be willing to swallow,” says Professor Lawless. “The question then becomes: What are you willing to stomach if it means electing somebody of your own party as opposed to helping somebody on the other side of the aisle?”
Rich Pedroncelli/AP/File
Since the height of #MeToo, the mentality of “believe women” has grown more cautious, says Michael J. Willemin, a partner at Wigdor law firm in New York. But the number of accusations hasn’t lessened, he says. And there’s been an increase “in understanding that someone doesn’t always come forward immediately.”
In Mr. Platner’s case, the latest allegation led to a quick collapse. After Mr. Platner’s ex-girlfriend said he had sexually assaulted her in 2021, he began losing support in a matter of hours, including endorsements from Democratic politicians and the Maine Democratic Party, which called for him to drop out of the race two days before he officially suspended his campaign.
Mr. Platner had already weathered a series of scandals, from a Nazi-themed tattoo to controversial Reddit posts, along with other accusations of misbehavior from former girlfriends.
“With Platner, this wasn’t just one person coming forward to try and ruin a political campaign right before Election Day,” says Professor Lawless. “This was a steady stream of allegations across a broad array of months and incidents.”
The National Women’s Defense League has found that 40% of officeholders resign following sexual misconduct allegations. But of the 60% who do not, many wind up winning reelection – 80% at the state level and 93% at the congressional level.
“It doesn’t seem to be disqualifying yet,” says Emma Davidson Tribbs, NWDL founding director.
In the current cycle, two dozen people in state governments and Congress who have been accused of sexual harassment or assault are running for reelection, she says.
Most of the time, leaders in each party play a role in deciding which candidates stay in a race, even though the national parties are relatively weak and have been unable to control who makes it through the primary system.
“The party apparatus drives all of it,” says Professor Lawless. “The reality is … if the party’s money dries up and the party’s connections to sophisticated wealthy donors dry up, it’s impossible to run.”
The political questions are separate from the legal questions. Laws vary from state to state and among legislative bodies. Some lawmakers say that Congress, which passed reforms after the biggest wave of #MeToo cases, needs stronger accountability measures and protections against retaliation.
Mariam Zuhaib/AP/File
Following the resignations of Mr. Swalwell and Mr. Gonzales, there was a bipartisan push for sharper consequences. Republican Rep. Nancy Mace was among 65 lawmakers from both parties who pushed unsuccessfully for the House Ethics Committee to make public all reports on allegations of congressional sexual misconduct. She and some others have called for the resignation of fellow Republican Rep. Cory Mills who has faced – and denied – allegations of violence against women.
Deepen your worldview
with Monitor Highlights.
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The directors of NWDL say, it’s not just up to voters; it’s also about whether institutions are structured in a way that prevents and polices abuse. That can start with anti-retaliation laws and transparency efforts to ensure voters know if lawmakers are facing accusations.
“The culture runs right into Congress, right off the campaigns,” says Sarah Higginbotham, a co-founder of NWDL. “If we can reform the institution itself, where we have these really strong levers, that’s part of the conversation.”
With Graham’s death, Trump loses a key ally in Congress
At a time of deep polarization and dysfunction in Washington, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham had rare abilities – to work across the aisle, to foster agreement on key issues, and, maybe most important, to serve as a liaison between a closely divided Senate and a mercurial president.
No one else in Congress had the kind of relationship with President Donald Trump that Senator Graham had. They were friends and allies, and Mr. Graham, perhaps unique among legislators, could influence the president’s thinking on consequential matters.
Now, after the South Carolinian’s sudden death on Saturday, Washington’s ability to function is cast even further into doubt.
Why We Wrote This
No one else in Congress had the kind of relationship with President Donald Trump that Senator Graham, who died Saturday, had. Mr. Graham influenced the president’s thinking on consequential matters, particularly in the realm of foreign policy.
Major legislative action awaits, including the annual defense bill, funding for the Iran war, renewal of a key overseas surveillance law, and an election administration bill that President Trump keenly wants in place for November’s midterm elections. Senate confirmations are also pending, including for Todd Blanche as U.S. attorney general. The federal government itself risks shutting down if funding isn’t approved by Sept. 30.
Of all the issues in play, none may be more affected by Mr. Graham’s absence than Ukraine and Israel, potentially profoundly so. The South Carolinian believed deeply in both nations’ right to exist and determine their own futures, and it’s unclear if anyone will be able to fill the void.
Ukrainian Presidential Press Service/Reuters
The death of Mr. Graham could also heighten the seeming competition between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance on foreign policy matters. Mr. Vance hails more from the isolationist, “America first” wing of the party than does Mr. Rubio, whose more internationalist viewpoint was regularly buttressed by the late senator. Both the vice president and the secretary appear to be gearing up to run for president in 2028.
For now, the mechanics of government move on. On Monday, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster was expected to announce who will serve the remainder of Mr. Graham’s term, which runs until early January. On Aug. 11, the state will hold an emergency GOP primary to replace Mr. Graham on the ballot.
The Republican margin of control in the Senate is narrower than it appears, even back at 53-47, after Mr. Graham’s replacement is sworn in. GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has been hospitalized for the past month, and it’s not clear when he will return to work.
The Republicans also have a lame-duck problem of Mr. Trump’s own making. Two GOP senators lost their primaries to Trump-backed opponents – John Cornyn of Texas and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana – and can’t be counted on to support the president’s position on any given vote. In addition, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, one of many retiring Senate Republicans, is a Trump antagonist whose vote also isn’t a sure thing.
But a larger question looms: Can anyone replace Mr. Graham as the Senate’s “Trump whisperer”? Various names have been floated, but his skill set will be hard to replicate. The late senator displayed a rare combination of firm ideological beliefs – especially as a foreign policy hawk – and flexibility on policy in the name of getting things done. Right before he died, he had hammered out a Russian sanctions package with Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut.
Mr. Graham had developed what was by all appearances a genuine friendship with Mr. Trump, be it as a frequent flyer on Air Force One or a regular golf companion at the president’s resorts. They spoke often on the phone, including just hours before Mr. Graham passed away Saturday amid a health emergency. The senator had just visited Ukraine.
Jacquelyn Martin/AP/File
This close bond, which developed during Mr. Trump’s first term, came as a bit of a shock, after the two competed for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination. Mr. Graham had declared Mr. Trump “unfit for office,” especially after the future president denigrated the military service of the South Carolinian’s close friend, the late Sen. John McCain.
But in the first Trump term, Mr. Graham put the past behind him and worked to help pass the president’s agenda and confirm his nominees, including to the Supreme Court. After the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, amid Mr. Trump’s claims that the 2020 election had been stolen, Mr. Graham again disavowed the president. And, again, they reconciled.
If Mr. Graham had a superpower, it might have been his interpersonal skills, especially as he advocated issues he cared most about.
“Lindsey was an intense fighter for the causes he believed in,” former GOP Rep. John Shadegg of Arizona writes in an email. He and Mr. Graham were both elected to Congress in the “Revolution of 1994,” when Republicans swept into their first House majority since the mid-1950s.
“He stood out in our class not only for his commitment to his beliefs, but for his understanding of human nature, his sense of humor, his incredible wit, and sense of timing,” Mr. Shadegg adds.
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Today, Mr. Graham’s absence is likely to be felt keenly, particularly on the foreign policy front. And the stakes are higher than ever. An old-school believer in America as leader of the free world and of global alliances, he was a staunch supporter of NATO.
Mr. Trump, who campaigned on “America first” and an end to “forever wars,” appears at times susceptible to the arguments of the last person he talks to. That person was often Mr. Graham. Now, it’s anybody’s guess who, if anyone, will fill that vacuum.
With Graham’s death, Trump loses a key ally in Congress
At a time of deep polarization and dysfunction in Washington, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham had rare abilities – to work across the aisle, to foster agreement on key issues, and, maybe most important, to serve as a liaison between a closely divided Senate and a mercurial president.
No one else in Congress had the kind of relationship with President Donald Trump that Senator Graham had. They were friends and allies, and Mr. Graham, perhaps unique among legislators, could influence the president’s thinking on consequential matters.
Now, after the South Carolinian’s sudden death on Saturday, Washington’s ability to function is cast even further into doubt.
Why We Wrote This
No one else in Congress had the kind of relationship with President Donald Trump that Senator Graham, who died Saturday, had. Mr. Graham influenced the president’s thinking on consequential matters, particularly in the realm of foreign policy.
Major legislative action awaits, including the annual defense bill, funding for the Iran war, renewal of a key overseas surveillance law, and an election administration bill that President Trump keenly wants in place for November’s midterm elections. Senate confirmations are also pending, including for Todd Blanche as U.S. attorney general. The federal government itself risks shutting down if funding isn’t approved by Sept. 30.
Of all the issues in play, none may be more affected by Mr. Graham’s absence than Ukraine and Israel, potentially profoundly so. The South Carolinian believed deeply in both nations’ right to exist and determine their own futures, and it’s unclear if anyone will be able to fill the void.
Ukrainian Presidential Press Service/Reuters
The death of Mr. Graham could also heighten the seeming competition between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance on foreign policy matters. Mr. Vance hails more from the isolationist, “America first” wing of the party than does Mr. Rubio, whose more internationalist viewpoint was regularly buttressed by the late senator. Both the vice president and the secretary appear to be gearing up to run for president in 2028.
For now, the mechanics of government move on. On Monday, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster was expected to announce who will serve the remainder of Mr. Graham’s term, which runs until early January. On Aug. 11, the state will hold an emergency GOP primary to replace Mr. Graham on the ballot.
The Republican margin of control in the Senate is narrower than it appears, even back at 53-47, after Mr. Graham’s replacement is sworn in. GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has been hospitalized for the past month, and it’s not clear when he will return to work.
The Republicans also have a lame-duck problem of Mr. Trump’s own making. Two GOP senators lost their primaries to Trump-backed opponents – John Cornyn of Texas and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana – and can’t be counted on to support the president’s position on any given vote. In addition, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, one of many retiring Senate Republicans, is a Trump antagonist whose vote also isn’t a sure thing.
But a larger question looms: Can anyone replace Mr. Graham as the Senate’s “Trump whisperer”? Various names have been floated, but his skill set will be hard to replicate. The late senator displayed a rare combination of firm ideological beliefs – especially as a foreign policy hawk – and flexibility on policy in the name of getting things done. Right before he died, he had hammered out a Russian sanctions package with Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut.
Mr. Graham had developed what was by all appearances a genuine friendship with Mr. Trump, be it as a frequent flyer on Air Force One or a regular golf companion at the president’s resorts. They spoke often on the phone, including just hours before Mr. Graham passed away Saturday amid a health emergency. The senator had just visited Ukraine.
Jacquelyn Martin/AP/File
This close bond, which developed during Mr. Trump’s first term, came as a bit of a shock, after the two competed for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination. Mr. Graham had declared Mr. Trump “unfit for office,” especially after the future president denigrated the military service of the South Carolinian’s close friend, the late Sen. John McCain.
But in the first Trump term, Mr. Graham put the past behind him and worked to help pass the president’s agenda and confirm his nominees, including to the Supreme Court. After the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, amid Mr. Trump’s claims that the 2020 election had been stolen, Mr. Graham again disavowed the president. And, again, they reconciled.
If Mr. Graham had a superpower, it might have been his interpersonal skills, especially as he advocated issues he cared most about.
“Lindsey was an intense fighter for the causes he believed in,” former GOP Rep. John Shadegg of Arizona writes in an email. He and Mr. Graham were both elected to Congress in the “Revolution of 1994,” when Republicans swept into their first House majority since the mid-1950s.
“He stood out in our class not only for his commitment to his beliefs, but for his understanding of human nature, his sense of humor, his incredible wit, and sense of timing,” Mr. Shadegg adds.
Deepen your worldview
with Monitor Highlights.
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Today, Mr. Graham’s absence is likely to be felt keenly, particularly on the foreign policy front. And the stakes are higher than ever. An old-school believer in America as leader of the free world and of global alliances, he was a staunch supporter of NATO.
Mr. Trump, who campaigned on “America first” and an end to “forever wars,” appears at times susceptible to the arguments of the last person he talks to. That person was often Mr. Graham. Now, it’s anybody’s guess who, if anyone, will fill that vacuum.
What’s it like to volunteer at the World Cup? Neon uniforms and no selfies.
The largest sporting event in the world does not happen by itself. This year’s World Cup is getting help from about 65,000 volunteers across 16 venues and three host countries. According to FIFA, the governing body that organizes the tournament every four years, about 1 million people applied to be volunteers.
I volunteered in Boston during the last men’s World Cup held on U.S. soil, in 1994. Back then, I passed a soccer ball around Boston Logan International Airport’s baggage claim with the World Cup mascot, amid welcoming arriving players and visitors. (And I wrote about it for the Monitor.) In the three decades since, the tournament has ballooned both by number of teams and revenue generated. Soccer fandom in the United States soared. How different could volunteering this year be, I wondered?
As it turned out, it was very different. Unlike last time, there was an extensive online questionnaire. Those who answered acceptably were invited to in-person tryouts. Yes, we had to try out to volunteer. At the tryouts, we were judged on how well we performed at team activities. We role-played scenarios involving disgruntled fans and were assessed on our general enthusiasm about soccer ... I mean football.
Why We Wrote This
This summer’s World Cup includes 65,000 volunteers who assist in everything from transporting players to greeting people at the airport. Participants include people from all walks of life, some of whom drive considerable distances to share in the experience.
Along the way, FIFA made the ground rules very clear: If selected, we were not to ask for selfies with or autographs from the players. Do not volunteer as a way to see the games for free. Do not record or transmit any action from the games. Above all, do not post a photo of your credential on social media and, if it is lost, report it immediately to the police.
All these steps, including background checks, occurred last fall. FIFA finally extended offers early this year to those who made the cut.
Volunteers can say where they would like to work, choosing from a list of 23 areas. I was selected for my top choice: media operations. This involves verifying the credentials of photographers and journalists, navigating them to their assigned areas, and helping to conduct post-game news conferences. Some volunteers serve as the “microphone monkey,” taking a mic to reporters asking questions.
Other volunteer roles include language services for visitors from other countries, event transportation, and accreditation for non-ticket holders such as players and referees. Guest operations involves greeting visitors at hotels and airports – the job I had as a volunteer in 1994.
Once selected, I took an online training course and made an appointment to pick up my volunteer uniform. At the last World Cup, I received a hat, T-shirt and jacket. This time, volunteers received an entire tracksuit, including short and long pants, right down to shoes and socks. When I wore the uniform to my first shift at the stadium in Foxborough, the security guard who checked me in told me that my uniform was “fire.” I thanked him and later checked with my Gen Z daughter who assured me that “fire” meant “good” or “cool.” According to her, FIFA “did me wrong” with the neon green color of the shirt, though.
The next challenge was getting to the games. I was hoping to take public transportation but, aside from the exorbitant prices, only game-ticket holders could ride the train to Boston’s games. So, I would drive 90 miles one way to the stadium, where parking is provided for the volunteers. Some volunteers came greater distances: One of my colleagues drove to Boston from Albany, New York, for each shift. Seeing the games, as a volunteer, was not guaranteed. I worked in the media operations center outside the stadium (where we can only watch on provided TVs), the press box (hit-and-miss because we stand in the back), and on the pitch (excellent views).
Each volunteer must sign up for at least six 6-hour shifts. FIFA provided one meal per session. Rather than sending us to the stadium’s food vendors, which were often overwhelmed with fans, the volunteers ate catered meals in a private lounge. FIFA served us chicken marsala, steak tips, and grilled salmon.
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The best part was meeting and getting to know my fellow volunteers, who come from all backgrounds, from college students to retirees. Some are immigrants or children of immigrants. Our supervisors are paid FIFA employees who manage to maintain a cheerful outlook under what are sometimes stressful conditions.
The next time the United States hosts a World Cup, count me in.
South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham dies
U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of President Donald Trump's closest allies in Congress who traveled the globe to advocate for a more aggressive U.S. foreign policy, died Saturday evening after a "brief and sudden illness," his office said in a statement posted on social media.
His office did not provide did not provide any additional details about the South Carolina Republican and said his family "appreciates prayers at this time and asks for privacy during this incredibly difficult period."
"Senator Lindsey Graham, one of the greatest people and Senators I have ever known, is dead!" Trump posted on social media early Sunday morning. "He was always working, and was a true American Patriot. Lindsey will be greatly missed!!! DETAILS AND ARRANGEMENTS TO FOLLOW. So sad!"
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said "my heart is heavy this morning to learn the passing of my friend and colleague, Senator Lindsey Graham."
"Lindsey's long and dedicated service in the Air Force and in Congress carried him to far-flung regions of the world," Thune said. "He was a strong advocate for the United States and a strong ally to freedom-loving countries across the globe. He believed in the might of America to achieve good in the world and dedicated his life to advancing that cause."
Graham was close with Trump
First elected to the U.S. Senate in 2002 after serving in the House, the former Air Force lawyer long promoted a policy of robust U.S. military interventionism and strong national defense that in later years, would put him at odds with the growing isolationist wing of the Republican Party.
But in recent years, Graham also became well known for his close ties with Trump, whom he briefly ran against for the party's presidential nomination in 2016.
Graham and Trump's relationship would begin on a rough note, with the senator calling the then-businessman "unfit for office."
Graham also used a profanity to describe Trump after he made disparaging comments about former Sen. John McCain, Graham's best friend in the Senate and a Vietnam War veteran. McCain and Graham, along with former Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., were known as the "Three Amigos" and frequently traveled to push their hawkish foreign policy views around the globe.
Not long after, Trump read out Graham's personal cellphone number during a campaign rally in South Carolina and continued to belittle him throughout 2016 as Graham made it clear he would not support Trump, even though he was the party's presidential nominee.
But Graham shifted significantly once Trump won the White House, emerging as one of Trump's top allies — speaking with him frequently and becoming a regular presence on the golf course alongside the president — even as McCain remained a critic.
In a 2018 interview with The Associated Press, Graham explained his pivot by saying McCain taught him that the country must move forward after elections and that meant "you have an obligation" to help the president. McCain ran twice for the White House.
"And I've tried to be helpful where I could because I think he needs all the help he can get," Graham said of Trump. "You can be a better critic when people understand that you're trying to help them be successful."
Graham appeared to break with Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, saying, "Count me out. Enough is enough." But the senator returned to the fold and remained close with the president during his second term.
Foreign policy was a focus for Graham
Graham especially advised Trump on foreign policy matters such as Iran and Russia, and had just announced an agreement on Friday with the Trump administration to move forward on a package of Russia sanctions. The senator had been in Ukraine to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who said that the senator visited his country 10 times during the years of Russia's full-scale invasion.
"Lindsey was a true defender of freedom and the values that make our world safer," Zelenskyy said.
His travels made him a familiar face to dozens of world leaders.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday mourned Graham's death, calling him "a great friend of Israel" and "a cherished friend of mine."
Netanyahu said Graham understood that the security of Israel and the United States is inseparable and devoted his life to defending America, strengthening the U.S.-Israel alliance and standing up for the free world.
"Israel has lost one of its greatest friends. America has lost a great patriot. I have lost a beloved friend," Netanyahu said, extending condolences to Graham's family and the American people.
The Republican had a prominent career on Capitol Hill
Graham had been serving as the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, giving him a central role during Trump's second term as Republicans pushed major legislation on party-line votes with a slim majority in the chamber.
His committee oversaw a process called reconciliation, a Senate procedure that allowed Republicans to pass significant policies such as last year's tax law without the threat of a Democratic filibuster.
He had previously led the Senate Judiciary Committee when Republicans confirmed Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court in 2020, and was in line to regain that gavel if the party kept control of the Senate after this year's midterms.
Graham was a key player in the Senate's efforts to craft a massive immigration overhaul in 2013 as a member of the so-called Gang of Eight, a bipartisan group that wrote a sweeping measure that would have altered virtually every part of U.S. immigration law. It passed the Senate with 68 votes but was never taken up by the House, so it did not become law.
But Graham's views on immigration, particularly an endorsement of a pathway to citizenship for people in the U.S. without legal status, put him at odds with some Republican factions.
He sometimes faced primary challenges in his home state of South Carolina, but he won the nomination outright in June while running for a fifth term. Graham was slated to face Democrat Annie Andrews, a pediatrician from Charleston, in November's general election.
The senator addressed the president in his victory speech last month, saying, "I'm going to help you change this world and change this country."
Little explanation from Graham's office
The sparse statement by Graham's office, which did not explain his death, comes during a stretch of concern about a lack of transparency about lawmakers' health.
Rep. Tom Kean Jr., a New Jersey Republican, was absent without explanation for months before returning to Congress and disclosing that he had been diagnosed with depression.
Sen. Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, was hospitalized weeks ago for undisclosed health reasons.
Republicans hold a narrow 53-47 majority in the Senate. Under South Carolina law, Gov. Henry McMaster, a Republican, will appoint a temporary replacement for Graham, and that person will serve until January.
McMaster said in a statement that Graham was "irreplaceable."
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"The fiercest of fighters for South Carolina and America — and a loyal and steadfast friend," McMaster said. As he offered condolences to his family, he added: "We shall not see his likes again."
Graham was not married and did not have children. His closest living relative is sister Darline Graham Nordone, whom he helped raise after both their parents died.
___
Chris Megerian in Washington, Brian P. D. Hannon in Bangkok and Geir Moulson in Berlin contributed to this report.
Mediators try to save crumbling Iran deal as Trump, Khamenei trade threats
U.S. and Iranian leaders traded threats on Saturday as the interim deal to end the war buckled under crossfire in the Middle East and efforts continued to keep talks going.
President Donald Trump overnight made threats on social media of further missile attacks against Iran, after the funeral of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei saw open calls for the U.S. leader's killing. Senior U.S. officials demanded that Iran make a public statement saying the Strait of Hormuz is open and ships won't be attacked.
Later, Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei vowed that Iranians would continue to avenge his father's death. Such revenge "is the will of our nation and must certainly be carried out," he said in remarks carried by state television. He still has not been seen publicly since the war began on Feb. 28 with strikes that killed his father.
Tehran has insisted that the strait remain under its control and that it be allowed to charge ships moving through it, a stance it took after the war began.
The exchange of threats followed days of U.S. airstrikes targeting Iran, sparked by Iran's attacks on three ships in the strait, and Iranian retaliatory fire targeting Arab nations in the region. Trump has declared the ceasefire over but said the U.S. would continue negotiations.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi on Saturday said he met with his counterpart in Oman, located on the other side of the strait, to discuss the waterway and "appropriate mechanisms for ensuring the safe passage of ships."
Trump says he responded to threats to kill him
A thousand "missiles are Locked and Loaded and aimed at the Islamic Republic of Iran, with thousands more to immediately follow, should the Iranian Government act on its threat," Trump wrote on his website.
He said he was responding to threats "to assassinate, or attempt to assassinate" him. During Khamenei's funeral, mourners held posters or banners calling for Trump to be killed along with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Iran buried Khamenei, 86, this week.
Trump added that the U.S. military would "completely decimate and destroy all areas of Iran — PRAISE BE TO ALLAH!"
Trump has repeatedly invoked the name of God in Arabic, and threatened to destroy Iran's very civilization. The Council on American-Islamic Relations, an advocacy group, has criticized Trump's "deranged mocking of Islam."
Iran accuses Washington of violating the interim deal
Iran's foreign minister accused the U.S. of violating the interim deal by ending waivers allowing Iran to sell crude oil on the open market in U.S. dollars. Washington ended them in response to the attacks on ships in the strait.
"Reality check: There can only be mutual compliance," Araghchi wrote on X.
He was scheduled to meet with his counterpart in Oman. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan told his country's state broadcaster, TRT, that he believed "a solution can be reached" this weekend between Iran and Oman.
The U.S. urges mariners to travel through the strait on a southern route, through Oman's territorial waters. Iran has said the strait must be under its sole control and that vessels should begin paying fees to Tehran. The world for decades has considered it an international waterway.
About a fifth of all traded oil and natural gas passed through it before the war began. Iran's grip on the strait during the war led to a global energy crisis, though oil prices have sharply dropped since wartime highs of $120 a barrel.
Tehran's diplomat at the United Nations said on Friday that any activity in the strait, including its opening or demining operations, "rests exclusively with Iran."
US officials accuse hard-liners of trying to sabotage the deal
U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity about the current situation with Iran, said the resumption of strikes this week came after what they described as a rogue faction of Iranian hard-liners tried to sabotage the ceasefire.
However, Iran has insisted its theocracy is unified under the new supreme leader.
After the U.S. wrapped up its latest strikes on Thursday, more attacks reportedly hit Iran, raising questions about who else may be targeting the Islamic Republic.
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Israel didn't claim them, meaning the Gulf Arab states may have launched them, likely as a means to deter Iran from attacking them again. Iran on Thursday retaliated for U.S. strikes by targeting Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait and Qatar.
The strikes in Iran over two days killed at least 17 people and wounded 115 others, Iranian Health Ministry spokesperson Hossein Kermanpour said.
___
Price and Weissert reported from Washington. Associated Press writer Sam Metz in Ramallah, West Bank, contributed to this report.
Mediators try to save crumbling Iran deal as Trump, Khamenei trade threats
U.S. and Iranian leaders traded threats on Saturday as the interim deal to end the war buckled under crossfire in the Middle East and efforts continued to keep talks going.
President Donald Trump overnight made threats on social media of further missile attacks against Iran, after the funeral of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei saw open calls for the U.S. leader's killing. Senior U.S. officials demanded that Iran make a public statement saying the Strait of Hormuz is open and ships won't be attacked.
Later, Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei vowed that Iranians would continue to avenge his father's death. Such revenge "is the will of our nation and must certainly be carried out," he said in remarks carried by state television. He still has not been seen publicly since the war began on Feb. 28 with strikes that killed his father.
Tehran has insisted that the strait remain under its control and that it be allowed to charge ships moving through it, a stance it took after the war began.
The exchange of threats followed days of U.S. airstrikes targeting Iran, sparked by Iran's attacks on three ships in the strait, and Iranian retaliatory fire targeting Arab nations in the region. Trump has declared the ceasefire over but said the U.S. would continue negotiations.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi on Saturday said he met with his counterpart in Oman, located on the other side of the strait, to discuss the waterway and "appropriate mechanisms for ensuring the safe passage of ships."
Trump says he responded to threats to kill him
A thousand "missiles are Locked and Loaded and aimed at the Islamic Republic of Iran, with thousands more to immediately follow, should the Iranian Government act on its threat," Trump wrote on his website.
He said he was responding to threats "to assassinate, or attempt to assassinate" him. During Khamenei's funeral, mourners held posters or banners calling for Trump to be killed along with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Iran buried Khamenei, 86, this week.
Trump added that the U.S. military would "completely decimate and destroy all areas of Iran — PRAISE BE TO ALLAH!"
Trump has repeatedly invoked the name of God in Arabic, and threatened to destroy Iran's very civilization. The Council on American-Islamic Relations, an advocacy group, has criticized Trump's "deranged mocking of Islam."
Iran accuses Washington of violating the interim deal
Iran's foreign minister accused the U.S. of violating the interim deal by ending waivers allowing Iran to sell crude oil on the open market in U.S. dollars. Washington ended them in response to the attacks on ships in the strait.
"Reality check: There can only be mutual compliance," Araghchi wrote on X.
He was scheduled to meet with his counterpart in Oman. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan told his country's state broadcaster, TRT, that he believed "a solution can be reached" this weekend between Iran and Oman.
The U.S. urges mariners to travel through the strait on a southern route, through Oman's territorial waters. Iran has said the strait must be under its sole control and that vessels should begin paying fees to Tehran. The world for decades has considered it an international waterway.
About a fifth of all traded oil and natural gas passed through it before the war began. Iran's grip on the strait during the war led to a global energy crisis, though oil prices have sharply dropped since wartime highs of $120 a barrel.
Tehran's diplomat at the United Nations said on Friday that any activity in the strait, including its opening or demining operations, "rests exclusively with Iran."
US officials accuse hard-liners of trying to sabotage the deal
U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity about the current situation with Iran, said the resumption of strikes this week came after what they described as a rogue faction of Iranian hard-liners tried to sabotage the ceasefire.
However, Iran has insisted its theocracy is unified under the new supreme leader.
After the U.S. wrapped up its latest strikes on Thursday, more attacks reportedly hit Iran, raising questions about who else may be targeting the Islamic Republic.
Deepen your worldview
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Israel didn't claim them, meaning the Gulf Arab states may have launched them, likely as a means to deter Iran from attacking them again. Iran on Thursday retaliated for U.S. strikes by targeting Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait and Qatar.
The strikes in Iran over two days killed at least 17 people and wounded 115 others, Iranian Health Ministry spokesperson Hossein Kermanpour said.
___
Price and Weissert reported from Washington. Associated Press writer Sam Metz in Ramallah, West Bank, contributed to this report.
AI moved in next door. For this Memphis community, life got more complicated.
On the edge of dense woods here, an area once inhabited by the Chickasaw Nation, lies a grotto now ringed by barbed wire that protects a new artificial intelligence data center, dubbed “Colossus 1” by its creator, tech mogul Elon Musk.
Just a short crow’s flight away, on the other side of the thicket but close enough to smell acrid fumes wafting from the facility, sits a historic village called Boxtown. Here, narrow paths connect modest homes. White-tailed deer strut across front yards. And while a power plant hums nearby, the area is generally quiet. On porches, where residents are used to spending long, hot summers telling stories, they are now bouncing between a state of wonder and concern about their unlikely new neighbor.
Driven by the AI boom, tech companies have opened nearly 1,200 new data centers in the United States in the past five years. This marks a staggering leap from the 1940s, when the military’s Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) debuted at the University of Pennsylvania as one of the world’s first modern computing facilities. The new data centers, which use vast amounts of power and water, have become a national focal point for concerns about the impacts of generative AI on human ethics, the economy, and those communities chosen as hosts.
Why We Wrote This
Artificial intelligence promises economic transformation. In a neighborhood called Boxtown, Tennessee, residents, who once used innovation to build their own community, are weighing challenges as needed resources are redirected to power an AI data center.
“When you put all this money on that machine, you ought to either help people with their electric bill or something,” says Boxtown resident Lemoyne Payton.
Patrik Jonsson/The Christian Science Monitor
As he notes, how tech affects how people treat each other is one thing. How it is reshaping the global economy by redirecting resources – capital, electricity, water – to turbocharge AI is another. And here in Memphis, where reinvention and reimagining ordinary life have long fueled innovation, AI’s physical infrastructure appears to be on a crash course with human lives lived in historic and natural spaces.
Promises made and broken
“Elon Musk gets a bad play in Memphis, but he’s not the problem,” says Donal Harris, director of the Marcus Orr Center for the Humanities at the University of Memphis. “It’s that places like Boxtown are seen as places where you can externalize the risk and environmental degradation so that people in other places can benefit.”
That phenomenon has been at play in Boxtown since its beginnings in 1863. Not long after Emancipation Day, formerly enslaved people noticed the area’s rich soil and its proximity to the Mississippi River and, with permission from the local railroad, built a community there, using decommissioned boxcars and old crates to construct homes.
In the 1960s, annexation by the city of Memphis promised Boxtowners upgraded services and suburban amenities. But even years after the city began collecting household taxes, little had changed: Most roads were still dirt, and many houses, with beams still bearing railroad insignia, lacked indoor plumbing or electricity, making it less suburb than frontier village.
“As late as 1975, the promised services never arrived ... The neighborhood faced official neglect,” wrote Aubrey Ford, Phoebe Weinman, and Walker Weinman in a 2019 article for StoryBoard Memphis, an online publication that bridges the city’s past with its future.
Despite those hardships, Boxtown grew and prospered. Success in Boxtown came to be defined by self-sufficiency, civic pride, and generational land ownership. Its expanding middle class, fueled by pioneering entrepreneurs and storekeepers, grew wealthier and sent children to college.
“We’re a family,” says lifelong resident Greg Kinsey. And the power of that family, he says, is that it has always faced the future and injustice united.
Patrik Jonsson/The Christian Science Monitor
But will community fortitude be enough to take on Colossus 1?
That’s a question now being posed by Boxtown local Justin Pearson, a state lawmaker who has challenged the mostly white power structure in Nashville with protests against a recent gerrymander of the city’s congressional district. By “cracking” Memphis’s majority-Black population into three separate districts, the new redistricting dilutes the neighborhood’s voting power, locals say.
Mr. Pearson, who has fought for stricter gun laws in Memphis, has also been challenging Colossus 1 since its inception.
“We’re being told by ... everybody who’s just greenlighting this project like it’s the best thing in the world, that this is okay for us to be mistreated,” he said at a community meeting in Memphis last year.
Mr. Pearson’s concerns are rooted in a hard lesson learned long ago in Boxtown: Official promises are easily made, but even easier to break. He fears that toxic air pollution and regulatory neglect will devastate this low-income community already burdened by industrial hazards. These are concerns that strike at the heart of AI’s future – a technology that, even its proponents concede, threatens to accelerate inequality and dim human agency.
Saul Brown, the Memphis Press-Scimitar newspaper morgue/Special Collections Department, University of Memphis Libraries (http://www.memphis.edu/libraries/special-collections/)
When industry surges ahead
A Memphis Press-Scimitar photograph from 1961 shows two Boxtown men atop a horse-drawn cart stacked with firewood – in front of a power plant.
The image, says Dr. Harris, “perfectly encapsulates the paradox of modern Memphis: Two old guys collecting firewood who live in the shadow of a power plant and don’t have electricity.”
Now, Colossus 1, a massive supercomputer and data center that will be used to train Grok, an artificial intelligence chatbot, is posing the same quandary as that coal plant did a half-century ago.
But the change is already coming faster than defenses can muster. Mr. Musk reconfigured an old appliance factory in about four months, installing portable natural gas generators to fuel the 300-megawatt processing facility. Those generators produce exhaust that some say poses a threat to human health.
Last month, Mr. Musk’s SpaceX corporation leased the facility to AI competitor Anthropic to power its fast-growing Claude chatbot at an estimated $1.25 billion per month for computing power at the Colossus 1 and Colossus 2 data centers in Memphis.
So Grok is out. Claude is in.
Patrik Jonsson/The Christian Science Monitor
Risk, reward, and innovation
To some, the new tenant suggests Memphis, long known for its entrepreneurial streak, could play a significant role in the evolution of this latest, powerful technology. The river city, known for its penchant for risky innovation, has helped revolutionize shopping (Piggly Wiggly, founded by Memphian Clarence Saunders, the first self-service grocery), global commerce (FedEx, started by native son Fred Smith), and music (Elvis Presley, Al Green, Otis Redding, Justin Timberlake, Sun Studios, and Stax Records), among other things.
Anthropic “describes itself as a Public Benefit Corporation with a single purpose: the responsible development of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity, with accountability to the public good embedded in its corporate DNA,” Memphis Mayor Paul Young said in a statement posted on the social platform X in May. “They built their tech with guardrails that the world can learn from. And now they’ve chosen Memphis to grow their capacity.”
Amid several AI players, Anthropic has arguably become the most powerful, recently hedging on releasing its latest chatbot, Mythos, amid fears that criminal enterprises could exploit it. Anthropic is expected to go public this year with what is anticipated to be a massive initial public offering.
Until recently, Mr. Musk was an Anthropic antagonist, once dubbing the company “Mis-Anthropic.” But with Anthropic’s lease now in hand, he has changed his tune. “So long as they engage in critical self-examination, Claude will probably be good.”
Meanwhile, resistance has steadily built in the U.S. against AI data centers: 71% of Americans oppose having a data center built “next door,’’ or near them, according to a May Gallup poll. More philosophically, a May Politico/Public First poll found that 43% of Americans believe AI’s risks outweigh its benefits, compared with 33% who say the opposite.
In few places are those tensions as tangible as they are in Boxtown.
In his 50s, Mr. Kinsey feels a deep sense of nostalgia for the community of his childhood. Much was gained with electricity and plumbing. But much was also lost, he says, including a forest of fruit trees, pristine air quality, and a sense of safety.
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As for Claude, now moving in down the street, he says the new technology holds both peril and potential. There are “so many questions, but not enough answers, as to what’s going on,” he says.
Still, change is part of life, he adds, and like most Memphians, he embraces the city’s love of betting big on bold ideas. “Might as well get ready for the ride. But don’t blink – or you’ll miss it.”
Feared for years, an Iranian attack on U.S. soil has not materialized. Here’s why.
Top U.S. intelligence officials warned for years – through both Republican and Democratic administrations – about the possibility of an Iranian terrorist attack on American soil.
These warnings grew louder in the wake of the U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities a year ago, and again this past February with the start of the U.S.-Israel war with Iran. The U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy released in May by the Trump administration called Iran and its proxies “the greatest threat to the United States emanating from the Middle East.”
This week, Israel allegedly told the U.S. that Iran is considering a plan to assassinate President Donald Trump, according to news reports. “They want to take out the U.S. leader – me,” Mr. Trump said Wednesday at a summit of NATO leaders in Ankara, Turkey.
Why We Wrote This
Experts say counterterrorism works. Yet new cuts to U.S. intelligence operations are happening just as officials debate whether it is vigilance — or Iranian restraint — that has been key to keeping America safe from serious threats.
Still, analysts are finding it mysterious that anticipated – and threatened – attacks against the U.S. have not materialized, particularly when the Iranian regime appeared to have little to lose as it fought to survive.
Waging a terrorist attack on American soil, for one thing, is tough to do, analysts say. It takes coordination, money, and the ability to evade extensive U.S. surveillance networks. These networks often include tight-knit immigrant communities who don’t want violence or the increased law enforcement attention that comes with it.
The absence of such attacks also points to Tehran’s political pragmatism: The regime might be deliberately avoiding provocations that could unite the American public behind a generally unpopular war.
Iranian leaders follow U.S. politics, says Daniel Byman, director of the Warfare, Irregular Threats, and Terrorism Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “They didn’t want to create justification for a war that, for many Americans, was lacking.”
What remains to be seen, analysts say, is how personnel cuts last month at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which critics argue had become too bloated and bureaucratic since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, affect future counterterrorism operations. The administration’s plan to downsize intelligence agencies’ staffing levels between 25% and 40% has lawmakers from both parties warning that such a move could undermine national security.
A foiled 2011 plot
The U.S. foiled an Iranian attempt to carry out an attack on U.S. soil in 2011. U.S. agents charged Manssor Arbabsiar, an Iranian car salesman living in Texas, with terrorism, alongside suspected members of Iran’s Quds Force – the special operations branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Jack Plunkett/AP/File
The alleged plot, which involved planting a bomb at a Washington restaurant to kill Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the U.S., was “conceived, sponsored, and directed from Iran,” said then-Attorney General Eric Holder. Mr. Arbabsiar later pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 25 years in federal prison, while the alleged Quds Force co-conspirators remained at large.
Retired Marine Gen. James Mattis, then the top commander of U.S. military operations in the Middle East, lamented that the U.S. had not responded “forcefully” enough to the plot.
“I anticipated that [the Iranians] would feel emboldened to challenge us more in the future,” he wrote in his 2019 memoir, “Call Sign Chaos: Learning to Lead.” Gen. Mattis went on to serve as defense secretary during Mr. Trump’s first term, but resigned after two years over disagreements with White House foreign policy.
Even in the midst of then-ongoing U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, “The first three things I asked my briefers about when I woke every morning,” he said in 2013, “were Iran, Iran, and Iran.”
The challenge of attacking on U.S. soil
Developing sleeper cells, however, involves long-term investment.
Iran has indeed long made these investments in Europe, where such attacks are easier to carry out than in the U.S., says Adrian Shtuni, an associate fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism in The Hague, Netherlands.
But that doesn’t mean these networks are robust. They tend to involve low-level criminals and are rife with “significant” capability gaps, he says. Rather than pointing to “the existence of deep-cover armies waiting to strike in Europe or the U.S.,” Mr. Shtuni adds, recruits carry out primarily symbolic operations that officials can easily deny.
Iran’s restraint is also highly calculated, Dr. Byman says. Even after the war was launched against them, Iranian leaders recognized that attacking the U.S. homeland could trigger a "rally 'round the flag" effect, he adds, boosting public support for an unpopular war.
When counterterrorism works
The lack of Iranian attacks on U.S. soil is also a testament to effective U.S. counterterrorism efforts, analysts say.
This became evident, they add, when U.S. authorities in May charged Mohammed Baqer Saad Dawood al-Saadi, an international operative and coordinator of the Iranian-backed militia Kataib Hezbollah, with plotting to wage attacks against synagogues in Los Angeles, Arizona, and New York City.
Mr. al-Saadi allegedly conspired with Iran’s Quds Force, unknowingly working with an FBI informant who then reported the information to the bureau, according to the indictment.
This charge offers a window into U.S. counterterrorism operations that have increasingly made attacks more difficult to carry out, Dr. Byman says.
“You need to coordinate things overseas,’’ he says. “You need to send operatives. You need to send money. You need to infiltrate the United States, to do surveillance, to stay low before doing the attack. And with each step, there is the possibility of a mistake.”
There is, too, the apparent U.S. and Israeli penetration of Iranian intelligence services.
“No layer is perfect,” he adds, “but when you combine it, it’s very powerful.”
Similar schemes carried out against synagogues in Europe by less-sophisticated criminal recruits connected to Mr. al-Saadi’s terrorist organization also appear designed to minimize casualties, since they were carried out at night, Mr. Shtuni notes.
“The goal is to generate fear and political pressure,” he says. “This reflects rational self-preservation, not ideological suicide.”
When communities offer warnings
It is the Pulse nightclub attack in Orlando, Florida, a decade ago, in which 49 people were fatally shot, that remains the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11. The perpetrator, Omar Mateen, was born in New York to Afghan immigrant parents and had pledged his loyalty to the Islamic State. Mr. Mateen was killed by law enforcement during the attack.
Phelan M. Ebenhack/AP/File
There had been multiple warnings about Mr. Mateen’s terrorist aspirations. The alarming statements his co-workers reported prompted the FBI to interview him twice. A gun store owner also contacted the bureau about Mr. Mateen’s suspicious questions regarding body armor and ammunition, but officials concluded that Mr. Mateen posed no threat.
These are warnings that federal law enforcement is more inclined to heed today. These run-ins also illustrate another reality of perpetrating attacks on U.S. soil, Dr. Byman says: While immigrant communities in many European countries are less likely to work with their governments to foil plots, that is not as true in the United States.
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Yet the cuts of dozens of staffers made by Bill Pulte after being appointed acting director of national intelligence in early June are raising concerns within the ODNI, created after 9/11 to coordinate the sharing of intelligence among federal agencies.
For now, Iranian operations have been “a clear example’’ of federal law enforcement’s increased effectiveness, Mr. Shtuni says. “Counterterrorism professionals have done an outstanding job in this high-tension period.”
Platner’s exit opens a new race: Will Maine Democrats pick another progressive?
In a bayside community garden in this coastal city, Wendy Chapkis sprays water across a raised bed planted with tomatoes, beans, and squash. Gardening offers a respite from the political tumult that Maine Democrats like Ms. Chapkis are facing amid the implosion of Graham Platner’s candidacy for the U.S. Senate.
On Wednesday night, Mr. Platner announced he was suspending his campaign two days after Politico reported that a woman he had dated accused him of drunkenly assaulting her at home in 2021. He has denied the accusation. His decision has set off a furious scramble for Democrats to nominate another candidate to face five-term Republican Sen. Susan Collins in November.
Ms. Chapkis, a retired sociology professor, voted in a June primary for Mr. Platner, a former Marine who farmed oysters, and she praises him as “a generational talent. That’s why this is heartbreaking,” she says. “The overwhelming sentiment among [Democrats] I know is grief.” But they also agree that he should step aside, she adds.
Why We Wrote This
The collapse of Graham Platner’s Senate campaign in Maine has state Democrats wrestling with questions over candidate vetting and whether the next nominee should come from the party’s moderate or progressive wing.
The messy derailment of a neophyte candidate backed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and other prominent progressives has reignited tensions within the party over the selection of nominees and how far left they should lean. Mr. Platner defeated the Democratic establishment’s preferred candidate, Gov. Janet Mills, who stopped campaigning before last month’s primary. Now, questions are being asked about candidate vetting and whether progressives overlooked flaws surfaced earlier in Mr. Platner’s campaign, in search of authenticity to advance their agenda in Maine.
J. Scott Applewhite/AP
Ms. Collins is the only GOP senator up for reelection whose state voted for Kamala Harris in 2024; not flipping Maine could sink Democrats’ hopes to regain the majority. That electoral math substantially raises the stakes for Democrats in this largely rural state of 1.4 million people.
Mr. Platner has until Monday to formally withdraw as the nominee. Democrats then have until July 27 to name a new candidate; several have already come forward, many of whom ran in congressional and gubernatorial primaries in June and have name recognition.
Democrats in Maine have promised a transparent nomination process, mindful of the blowback to Ms. Harris’s coronation in 2024 after President Joe Biden pulled out of the election. But the challenge is daunting, says Michael Brennan, a Democratic state legislator and former mayor of Portland. “There’s no defined process. We’re in uncharted territory,” he says. (The state Democratic Party plans to hold a convention, but how delegates will be chosen and whether they will be pledged to support a particular candidate is unclear.)
For now, perhaps the biggest question is whether Mr. Platner’s replacement will come from the wing of the party that he represented. In a video posted on Wednesday night, he accused Democrats in Washington of meddling in the process and of undermining progressives. He struck an overall defiant tone, one that has been a hallmark of his insurgent campaign.
Graham Platner for Senate/Reuters
To his backers, Mr. Platner’s unconventional style and personal journey are what made him the man for this political moment. Daniel Moraff, a left-wing consultant, insisted during a June interview with The Wall Street Journal that voters had grown tired of bland, on-message Democrats. “Part of our thesis here is that people do not want their candidates grown in vats. They want people who are real human beings.”
During high school in Bangor, Mr. Platner was voted “most likely to start a revolution.” He served four combat tours as a Marine, then worked as a security contractor, before returning to Maine to start over. Along the way, he left a trail of controversies that dogged his campaign to the point at which some Democrats had written off his chances in November. He had a chest tattoo that is a known Nazi symbol, wrote provocative social media posts and called himself an “antifa supersoldier,” and reportedly sexted with other women while married.
But his supporters stuck with him, and his events drew large, enthusiastic crowds. “He did something that was real. Our politics is a little boring up here,” says David Farmer, a longtime Democratic consultant in Maine. “That energy was real. It was easy to understand why people thought he was different and might be able to survive the scandals.”
Erin Oldham, a real estate entrepreneur, hosted a fundraiser in Portland for Mr. Platner. Now, she’s feeling “very disappointed and frustrated” at Mr. Platner because he gambled that his personal history wouldn’t be fully revealed in a high-stakes election. A tattoo is one thing, she says. “Violence towards women is a totally different thing.”
Like other progressive Democrats, she saw Mr. Platner as a bold candidate who spoke truth to power. “We’re looking for somebody with a clear message, and he does have a clear message. But he’s not a clear messenger,” she says.
This focus on finding an authentic messenger speaks to the broader challenge for Democrats who have lost their way with blue-collar voters, says Joan Williams, author of “Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back.” The rush to embrace Mr. Platner, and to explain away his brash ways, parallels the 2022 campaign of Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who married progressive policies with a working-class image.
Democrats need to find ways to connect with non-college-educated voters who make up the majority, says Professor Williams, an emerita law professor at the University of California, San Francisco. But this doesn’t necessarily mean a working-class candidate. Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia, for example, strikes populist chords about affordability and corruption. “He does that in a very different way by giving us facts. He doesn’t go all blue-collar about it,” she says.
Recent polling in Maine showed Mr. Platner trailing by nearly 30 points to Ms. Collins among white men without college degrees. His biggest support base is in cities such as Portland, where around half the voters have college degrees.
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His exit might offer a lifeline for Democrats if they can unite around an alternative. Progressives are wary of being steamrolled by Democrats who want to move to the center. “Graham Platner motivated people to vote,” says Ms. Chapkis. “You need a candidate that’s going to do that if you really want both registered Democrats and independents.”
Don Hogg, a retired government contractor out walking his dog in Portland on Wednesday, is glad to see the back of Mr. Platner, whom he never trusted. He wants a mainstream Democrat on the ballot who can beat Ms. Collins. “We can’t take a chance” on another Sanders-style progressive, he says.
Platner’s exit opens a new race: Will Maine Democrats pick another progressive?
In a bayside community garden in this coastal city, Wendy Chapkis sprays water across a raised bed planted with tomatoes, beans, and squash. Gardening offers a respite from the political tumult that Maine Democrats like Ms. Chapkis are facing amid the implosion of Graham Platner’s candidacy for the U.S. Senate.
On Wednesday night, Mr. Platner announced he was suspending his campaign two days after Politico reported that a woman he had dated accused him of drunkenly assaulting her at home in 2021. He has denied the accusation. His decision has set off a furious scramble for Democrats to nominate another candidate to face five-term Republican Sen. Susan Collins in November.
Ms. Chapkis, a retired sociology professor, voted in a June primary for Mr. Platner, a former Marine who farmed oysters, and she praises him as “a generational talent. That’s why this is heartbreaking,” she says. “The overwhelming sentiment among [Democrats] I know is grief.” But they also agree that he should step aside, she adds.
Why We Wrote This
The collapse of Graham Platner’s Senate campaign in Maine has state Democrats wrestling with questions over candidate vetting and whether the next nominee should come from the party’s moderate or progressive wing.
The messy derailment of a neophyte candidate backed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and other prominent progressives has reignited tensions within the party over the selection of nominees and how far left they should lean. Mr. Platner defeated the Democratic establishment’s preferred candidate, Gov. Janet Mills, who stopped campaigning before last month’s primary. Now, questions are being asked about candidate vetting and whether progressives overlooked flaws surfaced earlier in Mr. Platner’s campaign, in search of authenticity to advance their agenda in Maine.
J. Scott Applewhite/AP
Ms. Collins is the only GOP senator up for reelection whose state voted for Kamala Harris in 2024; not flipping Maine could sink Democrats’ hopes to regain the majority. That electoral math substantially raises the stakes for Democrats in this largely rural state of 1.4 million people.
Mr. Platner has until Monday to formally withdraw as the nominee. Democrats then have until July 27 to name a new candidate; several have already come forward, many of whom ran in congressional and gubernatorial primaries in June and have name recognition.
Democrats in Maine have promised a transparent nomination process, mindful of the blowback to Ms. Harris’s coronation in 2024 after President Joe Biden pulled out of the election. But the challenge is daunting, says Michael Brennan, a Democratic state legislator and former mayor of Portland. “There’s no defined process. We’re in uncharted territory,” he says. (The state Democratic Party plans to hold a convention, but how delegates will be chosen and whether they will be pledged to support a particular candidate is unclear.)
For now, perhaps the biggest question is whether Mr. Platner’s replacement will come from the wing of the party that he represented. In a video posted on Wednesday night, he accused Democrats in Washington of meddling in the process and of undermining progressives. He struck an overall defiant tone, one that has been a hallmark of his insurgent campaign.
Graham Platner for Senate/Reuters
To his backers, Mr. Platner’s unconventional style and personal journey are what made him the man for this political moment. Daniel Moraff, a left-wing consultant, insisted during a June interview with The Wall Street Journal that voters had grown tired of bland, on-message Democrats. “Part of our thesis here is that people do not want their candidates grown in vats. They want people who are real human beings.”
During high school in Bangor, Mr. Platner was voted “most likely to start a revolution.” He served four combat tours as a Marine, then worked as a security contractor, before returning to Maine to start over. Along the way, he left a trail of controversies that dogged his campaign to the point at which some Democrats had written off his chances in November. He had a chest tattoo that is a known Nazi symbol, wrote provocative social media posts and called himself an “antifa supersoldier,” and reportedly sexted with other women while married.
But his supporters stuck with him, and his events drew large, enthusiastic crowds. “He did something that was real. Our politics is a little boring up here,” says David Farmer, a longtime Democratic consultant in Maine. “That energy was real. It was easy to understand why people thought he was different and might be able to survive the scandals.”
Erin Oldham, a real estate entrepreneur, hosted a fundraiser in Portland for Mr. Platner. Now, she’s feeling “very disappointed and frustrated” at Mr. Platner because he gambled that his personal history wouldn’t be fully revealed in a high-stakes election. A tattoo is one thing, she says. “Violence towards women is a totally different thing.”
Like other progressive Democrats, she saw Mr. Platner as a bold candidate who spoke truth to power. “We’re looking for somebody with a clear message, and he does have a clear message. But he’s not a clear messenger,” she says.
This focus on finding an authentic messenger speaks to the broader challenge for Democrats who have lost their way with blue-collar voters, says Joan Williams, author of “Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back.” The rush to embrace Mr. Platner, and to explain away his brash ways, parallels the 2022 campaign of Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who married progressive policies with a working-class image.
Democrats need to find ways to connect with non-college-educated voters who make up the majority, says Professor Williams, an emerita law professor at the University of California, San Francisco. But this doesn’t necessarily mean a working-class candidate. Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia, for example, strikes populist chords about affordability and corruption. “He does that in a very different way by giving us facts. He doesn’t go all blue-collar about it,” she says.
Recent polling in Maine showed Mr. Platner trailing by nearly 30 points to Ms. Collins among white men without college degrees. His biggest support base is in cities such as Portland, where around half the voters have college degrees.
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His exit might offer a lifeline for Democrats if they can unite around an alternative. Progressives are wary of being steamrolled by Democrats who want to move to the center. “Graham Platner motivated people to vote,” says Ms. Chapkis. “You need a candidate that’s going to do that if you really want both registered Democrats and independents.”
Don Hogg, a retired government contractor out walking his dog in Portland on Wednesday, is glad to see the back of Mr. Platner, whom he never trusted. He wants a mainstream Democrat on the ballot who can beat Ms. Collins. “We can’t take a chance” on another Sanders-style progressive, he says.
As NATO seeks ‘healthy partnership,’ new Iran tensions flare
As top leaders gathered this week for the annual NATO summit, the focus – until U.S. President Donald Trump said that any ceasefire with Iran was likely “over” – had been on “burden shifting.”
Beyond calling into question the fragile ceasefire by saying the United States might hit Iran with a new wave of strikes Wednesday evening, Mr. Trump’s threat complicates ongoing discussions among European partners here on how they can take on more of the alliance’s defense and financial costs.
By Wednesday evening, he had backtracked to say, of the war in Iran, “I don’t think it’s going to start again,” and that any further strikes “will be over very quickly.”
Why We Wrote This
The back-and-forth talk of strikes and ceasefires in the Iran conflict at the NATO summit this week risks straining the alliance's renewed efforts at partnership and unity, a cornerstone of Western defense for decades.
In a wrap-up news conference on Wednesday, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said he thought President Trump “was totally right” to strike Iran. But he also tried to turn the conversation back to the alliance and what “NATO 3.0” – as the capability shifts have been dubbed – might look like as he spoke of equalizing defense spending between Europe and the U.S.
Mr. Rutte described the effort as a move from an “unhealthy co-dependence” to a “healthy partnership.” He also said on Wednesday that the alliance “warmly welcomed” President Trump’s leadership on this front.
Mr. Rutte has been both derided and lauded as the “Trump whisperer” for his good-cop role in NATO’s dealings with the American president. He publicly supported Mr. Trump’s decision to strike Iran again this week for what officials described as violations of the ceasefire, even as the prospect of renewed war threatens to reignite Mr. Trump’s resentments about Europe not doing more to help fight the regime in Tehran.
Whither the ceasefire?
Speaking to reporters in Turkey, alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President Trump said the U.S. would probably hit Iran with a deluge of strikes again on Wednesday evening.
“I’ll give them a little warning; we’re going to hit them hard again tonight,” he said, adding that the ceasefire was likely over, though negotiations could continue.
Alex Brandon/AP
Meanwhile, other NATO officials are warily eyeing another potential move: the Trump administration’s announcement last month of a review of U.S. military forces on the continent. The U.S. has strongly hinted that such cuts hinge on Europe making good on its pledge – made this time last year at The Hague – to step up security spending.
“This is the ‘Show Me the Money’ summit,” Bradley Bowman, senior director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said last week during a roundtable discussion for journalists. “The time for some of our NATO allies to say ‘the check is in the mail’ on defense spending is over.”
Europe’s new plan
Europe is stepping up, analysts say. Germany sent an armored brigade of 5,000 soldiers to Lithuania to shore up NATO’s eastern flank, for example, marking the first permanent overseas deployment of German forces since World War II. Allies are also investing in ammunition production and other defense-industrial capacities.
The U.S. would have had a difficult time prosecuting the war in Iran without the use of European bases, NATO officials privately note. NATO member nations have hosted some 5,000 U.S. military sorties during the conflict, Mr. Rutte added on Wednesday.
Mr. Trump’s oscillating grudges, however, have fueled concerns that the troop cuts and the removal of other U.S. military resources from the continent will outpace Europeans’ ability to carry that burden themselves.
Umit Bektas/Reuters
In the background, there is also the looming matter of Greenland, on which Mr. Trump still appears to have designs. “Denmark doesn’t spend money or really help Greenland,” but it’s “important” for the U.S., President Trump said shortly after arriving in Ankara.
Save the drama
The hope in making this summit a brief gathering was, like a fraught family dinner, to keep drama to a minimum, said Max Bergmann, director of the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), during a roundtable discussion last week.
“There’s maybe some passive-aggressive or rude comments thrown around here or there,” he added, “but nothing explodes into an actual sort of fight.”
Holding the NATO gathering in Ankara was seen by many as a move to make sure Mr. Trump, out of respect for authoritarian Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, would show up.
Still, there is speculation that, to minimize the potential for clashes, future high-profile meetups, such as the big NATO meeting scheduled for next year in Albania, might be canceled. That could make this the last summit of Mr. Trump’s presidency.
When diplomacy matters
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth brought the drama to a pre-summit meeting of top NATO officials last month, berating allies – in front of the media, many of them noted – for letting the U.S. down in Iran after some refused to grant U.S. forces base access for operations.
Virginia Mayo/AP
This did not go down well in much of Europe. Still, a Pew Research Center survey of citizens in 13 member states released this month found that two-thirds of European respondents view NATO favorably. In the U.S., just over half of respondents say they do.
There are plenty of bread-and-butter concerns, however, among European citizens, who have been watching their governments cut social programs in favor of military spending.
In a nod to these concerns, and under provisions agreed to at last year’s NATO summit to increase defense spending to 3.5% for traditional military hardware, and another 1.5% for more open-ended defense-related expenditures, member states are also investing in civilian infrastructure such as bridges, ports, rail networks, and roads.
They are integrating the lessons of Ukraine as well when it comes to drones, electronic warfare, and artificial intelligence. At the summit, NATO pledged some $80 billion in military equipment assistance for Ukraine for 2027, matching the amount pledged this year.
In the meantime, the alliance is using a mechanism it calls the NATO Force Model to map out how Europe can shoulder more of the alliance’s conventional capabilities that could be needed in the event of a wider war.
Give and take
Still, a number of capabilities – or “strategic enablers,’’ in military parlance – that Europe relies on for its defense remain overwhelmingly American.
This includes intelligence and surveillance assets as well as long-range bombers, air-to-air refueling, and, ultimately, NATO’s nuclear deterrence.
For now, the U.S. still pays the bulk of the NATO tab. In 2024, U.S. spending represented 52% of NATO’s combined gross domestic product but covered 64% of the alliance’s expenditures, according to an Atlantic Council report. In 2025, even after The Hague pledged to extend NATO member spending to 5% of GDP, the U.S. still covered roughly 62% of the costs.
Yet, as this gap decreases, so, too, could U.S. influence on the continent, say analysts who note that historically, the U.S. didn’t help Europe solely out of the goodness of its heart. The hefty contributions have given America strategic leverage on the continent.
For the past 77 years, “That’s how we have wanted it – that is how we have insisted on NATO being structured,” Mr. Bergmann of CSIS said.
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With the moves underway to step back from NATO, American influence could wane.
What is less clear is how Europe will forge its defense policy, he added, “in a world where they’re not going to be turning to the United States for leadership.”
What is the Iran war costing Americans? Here’s a breakdown.
The shaky peace deal in place between the United States, Israel, and Iran was called into question once again this week with the U.S. and Iran trading retaliatory strikes. It prompted President Donald Trump to declare, “I think it’s over” of the ceasefire, even as he said that negotiations could continue. On June 17, leaders signed a memorandum of understanding that gave them 60 days to reach a peace deal.
In the meantime, experts have begun to tally the cost of the Iran war. While direct U.S. military operations in Iran are now estimated at up to $42 billion, long-term economic and veteran expenses may push the cost higher. Whatever the final number, Trump administration officials have already acknowledged that the war’s price tag will be higher than initial estimates.
It rose by about $4 billion in two weeks late this spring, when Pentagon comptroller Jules Hurst told lawmakers that the Department of Defense estimate for the war, eight weeks in, had jumped from $25 billion to $29 billion. (The initial U.S. Pentagon estimate for the Iran conflict was roughly $11.3 billion for the first six days of the operation.)
Why We Wrote This
The Iran war’s cost to Americans has already climbed well beyond early estimates, with an $87 billion funding request pending. Long-term economic and veteran expenses push the broader cost higher. And new attacks call into question whether the hostilities will soon end.
This $29 billion tally did not include repairs to U.S. bases in the Middle East – repairs that could add at least $5 billion more to the cost, according to the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) think tank. On Wednesday, Iran said that it had shot down an MQ-9 Reaper drone and struck 85 U.S. military sites, potentially adding to the bill.
Analysts are also assessing the human toll. Thirteen American service members have been killed and some 400 injured in the conflict, along with Iran’s reported 1,700 civilian fatalities. The loss of mothers, fathers, children, and siblings is a cost, they add, that can never be calculated.
The expense could climb higher still, with the ongoing tit-for-tat strikes between Iran and the U.S.
To help cover the price of everyday operations, troop deployments, and weapon replacements, the White House has submitted an $87 billion supplemental funding request to Congress, an ask likely to face sharp bipartisan scrutiny. Other researchers estimate that the broader economic toll (such as higher fuel and food costs) is costing households up to $1,000 each.
Charlie Neibergall/AP
What have been the biggest cost drivers of the war?
Missiles and other munitions have been the U.S. military’s biggest war-related expenses to date, totaling some $26 billion, according to a June 23 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
“The thing that probably surprises me most was just how big a chunk of the cost was in munitions, particularly the high-end, expensive munitions,” says Mark Cancian, senior adviser with the CSIS Defense and Security Department and the report’s co-author.
Adm. Brad Cooper, the head of U.S. Central Command, which runs U.S. military operations in the Middle East, told lawmakers in a May hearing that by the time of the ceasefire, the U.S. had fired 13,629 munitions in strikes on more than 13,000 targets.
“U.S. forces fired many expensive missiles,” the CSIS report noted. This includes more than 1,000 Tomahawks, for example, at about $2.6 million each. The cost of interceptors to counter Iranian strikes ranges from some $28 million for an SM-3 ship-launched interceptor – designed to destroy missiles while they’re still in space – to $12 million for each THAAD interceptor and $5 million for each Patriot missile.
“The coalition’s success in rapidly suppressing Iranian air defense systems greatly reduced the daily cost of munitions,” according to the CSIS report.
“The first couple of days chewed up probably half the ammunition cost,” Mr. Cancian says. “Once we beat down their air defenses, then we could fly over Iran and use much less expensive munitions,” at a cost of $100,000 each rather than millions.
What are the biggest-ticket items that will need to be replaced?
Forty-two U.S. military aircraft have been lost or damaged in the war, according to the Congressional Research Service.
The cost of repairing damaged aircraft “is assumed to be 25 to 75 percent of the replacement cost,” according to the CSIS report.
Then there is the damage to U.S. military bases in the Middle East. Though the U.S. and its allies have intercepted 90% of the missiles and drones that Iran launched against these installations, the damage that Iran’s munitions caused when they did strike could total between $5 billion, as the AEI report estimated, and $9.4 billion, according to other analysts.
It’s unclear how many buildings at these installations have been struck, but satellite damage assessment suggests about 228 structures have been affected.
What precisely was inside those buildings is another matter. “For some, such as barracks and gyms, the material contents were not particularly valuable,” the CSIS report notes. “For warehouses, however, the contents could be as valuable as the building itself.”
How about the price of fuel?
The Department of Defense is particularly affected by the increased global oil prices that followed the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, as one of the world’s largest consumers of petroleum, for example, accounting for between 80% and 90% of the fuel consumed by the federal government.
These costs have most affected the Air Force in the Iran war, with its need for jet fuel, and the Navy, which powers ships and its own aircraft.
The war has also cost consumers in higher fuel and food prices. From the start of the war until mid-May, Americans have spent more than $40 billion on extra gasoline and fuel costs, or roughly $300 per household, above what they had been paying in February, according to a Costs of War study from Brown University.
This exceeds the estimated cost of completely revamping the U.S. air traffic control system, and could also pay for the 2024 Bridge Investment Program to repair and modernize more than 10,200 of America’s bridges, the study adds.
What are the additional costs over time?
The approximately 400 service members who have been injured during the war may need, after immediate care, additional medical and disability services over time at a price of some $400 million annually, according to the CSIS study.
Roughly 37% of veterans from the Gulf War in 1991 receive lifetime disability benefits. After a massive March fire on the USS Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier, while it was operating in the Red Sea in support of the Iran war, some 600 sailors were exposed to serious smoke inhalation, notes an April report from the Harvard Kennedy School.
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“If even one-third of the 55,000 troops deployed [to the Middle East for the Iran war] today claim benefits,” it says, “then we are committing ourselves to tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in disability and medical care costs for this cohort alone.”
The U.S. currently owes $7.3 trillion in disability benefits alone to veterans of previous wars, the report adds.
What an epic movie version means for ‘The Odyssey’ and other classics (video)
Given the excitement around Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of Homer’s “The Odyssey,” don’t be surprised if your movie theater starts offering popcorn drizzled with Greek olive oil.
Yet Mr. Nolan’s epic arrives at a time when many colleges are ditching classes about Homer. Not to mention Virgil, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.
Some ask: Why should we bother with the classics?
The Monitor posed that question to three scholars. We convened a video conversation between Daniel Mendelsohn, editor at large at The New York Review and a professor at Bard College whose 2025 translation of “The Odyssey” is widely acclaimed; Walter Sterling, president of St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico; and Anika Prather, a professor at Catholic University in Washington, D.C.
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We discussed the resurgence of the classics in popular culture, their place in higher education, and why those works face ideological tussles between the left and the right. All three panelists were looking forward to seeing “The Odyssey” at the cinema. They were even more eager to see whether it might generate interest in the classics from young moviegoers.
Regardless of whether you’ve read Homer’s epic, the panel discussion may offer fresh insights into why these ancient Greek and Roman texts have endured for millennia.