James' World 2

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Charles Duhigg explains why trying to eliminate a bad habit is neurologically futile, and what to do instead.

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Sound on

Charles Duhigg is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of The Power of Habit, which spent over three years on bestseller lists and has been translated into 40 languages,[…]

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Hmmmm … Sic Semper Tyrannis – TARADO!

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Iran’s military leaders have greeted the cease-fire agreement with President Trump as a triumph, crowing that “through the imposition of their divine and iron will,” they had “humiliated American and Zionist enemies.”

Mostly, they’re right.

Mostly, because it’s worth remembering that the current regime in Iran is far less formidable than it was before the Hamas assault on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Back then, Iran had potent allies and proxies in Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, and Yemen. Its nuclear program was intact and steadily accumulating ever larger quantities of highly enriched uranium. It had a powerful military-industrial base, a weak but functional economy, and a government that — for all its repressiveness — was internationally recognized as legitimate.

Today, much of that is either gone or diminished. Iran is no longer within sprinting distance of a bomb. Its ally in Syria was deposed. Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis have lost much of their fighting strength. The Iranian rial is the world’s most worthless currency. The leadership rules an unhappy population that — outside of die-hard loyalists — would almost certainly overthrow it if given the chance. Its latest ballistic missile salvo against Israel failed to land a serious single blow. Its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz strained, but did not strangle, the world’s energy markets.

Those are real achievements against an evil, ambitious regime. Yet the outcome of war rarely rests on a tally of relative strength. War is a contest of wills. And in that contest, the hard men of Tehran appear to have scored a decisive victory over the vain man of Washington.

I write this as someone who supported the war from the outset and hoped to see Trump carry it through to a decisive result: if not regime change, then at least a deal in which Iran would be forced to relinquish all of its enrichment capabilities and access to the Strait was unfettered. Those goals were well within the president’s reach, particularly if he had continued to attack Iran’s military-industrial infrastructure until it agreed to terms, rather than conducting most of the negotiations after the fighting had mostly stopped.

But Trump got spooked after the regime didn’t instantly crumble, and energy prices shot up. He then effectively abandoned the war he had started after less than six weeks of sustained combat — combat in which the United States lost fewer service members than in the 1983 invasion of Grenada. He compounded the error with an almost comical succession of military threats and last-minute climb-downs, each of them signaling indecision and weakness to Iranian adversaries practiced in the study of weakness.

Tehran took the measure of Trump’s courage. What it found was a bone spur.

All this may seem odd for a president who once loudly complained that the United States hadn’t “fought to win” a war since 1945, who demanded “unconditional surrender” from Tehran and who had repeatedly lambasted his predecessor for the humiliating exit from Afghanistan. Then again, it’s not odd for a president whose very essence is betrayal of everyone and everything, his own words not least.

Though the details of the deal remain murky — a telling indicator of its likely shoddiness, since the administration would surely trumpet the terms of a strong agreement — it’s already clear that Trump has betrayed his promise to the Iranian people, after they were massacred in January to quell antigovernment protests, that “help is on its way.” As in Venezuela, to say nothing of China and Russia, this administration’s message to oppressed people everywhere is that their rights come last.

Trump is also on his way to betraying Israel, our principal ally in this fight, by pushing Jerusalem to stand down in its effort to stop Hezbollah’s attacks on its north, in that way handing Tehran the victory of creating a diplomatic linkage between Lebanon and Hormuz. If Iran is now allowed to extract some kind of service fee for permitting ships to transit the Strait, Trump will have also betrayed our allies in the Persian Gulf by giving Iran financial and strategic leverage to which it has no right, and which it didn’t previously have.

The worst betrayal, however, is of Americans who supported the war — not only neocons like me but also most of Trump’s MAGA base — because we believed that Iran, which has waged a 47-year war against us, posed an increasingly intolerable threat to our security and vital interests.

This cease-fire neither ends nor eases that threat; it hardens and magnifies it. It removes the one point of U.S. leverage over Iran — the naval blockade of its ports — before there’s any negotiation over its nuclear program, which the Iranians will almost surely drag out until Trump is out of office. It reminds the world of the adage that while it can be dangerous to be America’s enemy, it is fatal to be its friend. And it gives Iran’s leaders something even more vital: The confidence that, whatever Trump may threaten, they can withstand the most any American president or Israeli prime minister can throw at them.

There’s a word for this: debacle. Not because the war, for all its costs or errors of execution, was a mistake. It’s because this pretense of a peace is an act of geopolitical self-harm that will haunt our standing in the world for years to come.

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Photo illustration by Tam Stockton for The New York Times

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When Emma Scales decided she wanted to be a scientist, it seemed logical—simple, even. She’d grown up in coastal New Jersey, attended a high school that emphasized marine biology, and learned about the connections among sea creatures large and small. She felt a calling to better understand and protect a world she loved.

Now a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University, Scales is studying symbiosis, specifically the way bacteria can grow inside fungi and create a mutual-use arrangement. It’s what she calls a “Russian nesting doll” system. But these days, little seems simple or logical. Scales’s research is aimed largely at protecting food crops, and at Cornell, she’s recently watched laboratories shut down because of federal funding cuts, including labs running practical programs meant to help strengthen U.S. agriculture. Since 2025, the Trump administration has cut more than 7,800 grants, removed 25,000 scientists and related personnel from their jobs, and, as of January 2026, proposed budget cuts equaling about $32 billion. Cornell has recovered its funding, but doing so came with its own heavy costs, and warning signs are still flashing.

Scales is one of thousands of early-career researchers in the U.S. trying to make sense of how the current tumult in American science will shape their professional paths. Between lost funding and stalled programs, the young scientists of today are facing uncertainty in the job market and the possibility of having to leave the U.S. or, in some cases, leave science completely.

But Scales has decided to fight back, joining with other graduate students trying to protect universities. “They are scrubbing science of the influence of some of its most brilliant scientists. Work that has taken decades to build is being wiped out,” she says. When the research community gets a chance to rebuild, she wonders, how long will it take to regain what’s been lost?

Julia Menzel, an American early-career science historian currently at the University of Toronto, has similar questions. “There has got to be some way to dull the negative impact this has on people trying to start their careers in science,” she insists. “If we lose a generation of scientists, we are going to see very negative consequences.”

Menzel’s research, which she began while completing a Ph.D. in the history of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, tells us that the country has faced these kinds of challenges before. Administrations hostile to evidence have previously worked to dismantle the U.S. scientific enterprise. And history is cyclical—many science historians point to similarities between the eras of Donald Trump and Richard Nixon and the ways these presidents sowed distrust of science among Americans to push their agendas. For example, in an echo of today, Nixon imposed widespread cuts to research funding while redirecting money to his chosen science projects. In subsequent administrations, science regained both money and status, in part because of strategic advocacy by scientists. Will such a pattern repeat this time around?

David Kaiser, a physicist and historian of science at M.I.T. who mentored Menzel, believes that the past tells us to hold on, that we don’t yet know the end of the story. But the solution may come from young scientists like Scales who take on the task of rebuilding science as a profession. They may need to use a new blueprint. They may need to invent their future. But first, they need to survive the present. “There’s now a deeply felt uncertainty about science,” Kaiser says with a sharp edge of worry. “There are so many students, so gifted and earnest, who go into research because they want to help the world. And they are marching toward a future that looks nothing like what I had hoped for them.”

The U.S. has long been committed to supporting R&D. In 2023, the country’s investment in research was about 3.45 percent of its gross domestic product, making it the fifth-highest worldwide. The National Science Foundation says the total amount spent on science in 2024 was $993 billion. Of that, almost 19 percent came from the federal government. Nearly 76 percent came from industry. In 2024, federal research dollars went mostly to federal agencies and certain public-private research partnerships (43 percent), then universities (31 percent) and businesses (19 percent).

The return on investment for science is equally enormous. The National Institutes of Health alone provide more than $69 billion toward the U.S. GDP through research, and a medical-research advocacy group reports that every NIH dollar spent on research returns $2.57 in new economic activity. The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has found returns of up to 300 percent from government research and development since the days after World War II.

Science itself is not partisan, and research is supposed to inform policymaking. Yet science funding in the U.S. has long been a political pinball.

President Barack Obama promised that “the days of science taking a back seat to ideology” were over in 2009, saying he hoped to double federal research spending during a time when federal spending was in a minor upswing. But a Congress dominated by the Tea Party thwarted him. In the end, according to an analysis by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, congressionally approved funding by federal agencies instead dropped a full 10 percent, when adjusted for inflation.

The first Trump administration immediately sought to deepen those cuts. This move, too, was stymied by congressional resistance. The budget of the NIH—the largest supporter of research at U.S. universities—went from about $30 billion in 2015 to more than $48 billion in 2025, in part because of President Joe Biden’s call for greater investment in research. Biden, in fact, campaigned on a promise to respect scientific advice; Trump responded by mocking Biden for listening to scientists.

The second Trump administration has further targeted science funding. It has frozen grants and other money across the spectrum of research. The proposed budget for fiscal year 2027 asks to reduce the amount earmarked for nearly every federal science agency, including a 55 percent cut to the NSF. And although Congress has voted to restore much of the funding and federal judges have tried to intervene, the administration has used internal agency decisions and presidential memos to slash budgets as often as possible—and, on occasion, simply held back money authorized by Congress. “I don’t think anyone was prepared for the aggressiveness and suddenness of the cuts,” says University of Maryland, College Park, historian of science Melinda Baldwin. “I can’t really think of a similar moment in the past where funding has been cut off that fast.”But government hasn’t always been the primary funder of science. In the 19th century, research was largely practical, seen as the purview of independent businesspeople. Take Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin, which revolutionized the mechanical aspects of farming in the early 1800s, or Alexander Graham Bell’s commercial development of the telephone later that century. Both men had benefactors supporting their efforts.

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Pepe Serra

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Key Takeaways

• Big Think has launched its first-ever online store, a collaboration with the infographic poster company Pop Chart.
• Our first poster with Pop Chart is “A Visual History of the Universe,” which features stunning illustrations of the universe from its earliest moments to the present.
• Check out Big Think’s store on Pop Chart to find the poster — as well as T-shirts, hoodies, mugs, notebooks, and, soon, our quarterly print magazines. 

Every few months, I round up useless or unused objects in my house, walk to the alley, and plop them into the dumpster without a second thought. I am no collector or hoarder. I only really value a few physical possessions: my three guitars, my books and magazines, and a small collection of posters and art (my favorite being a painting of a stork whose eyes stare right through you, made by my late grandpa).

That last category is something I could use much more of: beautiful things to look at. One piece that’ll soon hang on the wall of my office comes from my colleague, Ben Gibson, a design director at Big Think.

He recently created a poster called “A Visual History of the Universe,” made with help from Dr. Ethan Siegel, an astrophysicist and author of the Big Think column Starts With A Bang. It’s a poster that strikes a rare balance between being aesthetically stunning while also teaching you something useful — in this case, scientists’ best explanation for how everything around you came to be.

Ben’s been striking that balance since he was a kid.

“I had always loved looking at things like maps, charts, and cutaway illustrations, and spent a lot of hours (too many!) trying to draw them myself,” he said.

In 2010, he cofounded the infographics poster company Pop Chart with Patrick Mulligan after the two met while working at Penguin Books.

“Patrick also loved this stuff, and we started finding ways to incorporate these things into the books we were working on at Penguin — but we realized we needed a bigger canvas.”

The first poster the two produced was a chart of rapper names, diagrammed according to semantics. They’ve since sold hundreds of thousands of infographic posters and other products, becoming a design shop for advertising, events, publishing, and custom merchandise, with clients like HBO, Nike, Wieden + Kennedy, The New York Times, and the MoMA Design Store.

Pop Chart’s posters cover everything from literature’s most famous opening lines (as analyzed through the Reed-Kellogg system) to a visual breakdown of the Beatles’ discography by instruments featured on each song to a taxonomical diagram of every species of bird in North America — a bestseller that Ben said took about four months of “pretty painstaking research, illustration, and design to complete.”

The New York Times has dubbed Pop Chart “the poster mavens.” Fast Company described their posters as “catnip for uber-geeks.” Popular Science called them the “master of the infographic poster.”

Now, Big Think is calling them a partner. On Pop Chart, we recently launched Big Think’s first-ever store, where you can find our “A Visual History of the Universe” poster, along with Big Think T-shirts, hoodies, mugs, notebooks, and much more.

We’ll be designing and releasing many more posters over the coming months. It’s a natural partnership: Like Big Think, Pop Chart is always “uncovering deeper, surprising, and fascinating layers” about the world, Ben said. Big Think does that with articles and videos. Pop Chart turns those ideas into something worth hanging on your wall.

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Ideas worth displaying.

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The framework deal between the United States and Iran sets the stage for an end to the bursts of violence and debilitating disruption of energy deliveries and trade in the Persian Gulf. But don’t expect economies around the globe to simply pick up where they left off before the United States and Israel began bombing Iran on Feb. 28.

The war has set in motion changes that will be hard to reverse.

The global energy order is being reshaped.

The near shutdown in oil and gas deliveries from the Middle East and the leap in prices are causing a shift in power. Energy producers from the Gulf to the Americas are jockeying to maintain or increase their dominance, and customers are struggling to reduce their dependency and shore up their supply.

As a result, the energy market is changing, the energy mix is changing, and the energy players are changing.

The profound vulnerability of countries throughout Asia, Europe, and elsewhere that depend on imported energy is supercharging the hunt for alternatives. In some places, like South Korea and Japan, that has led to an increased use of dirtier fuels like coal.

But over the longer term, this energy shock — the second in just four years — is likely to accelerate a transition to renewables like solar and wind as well as nuclear power.

Improvements in electric battery technology and efficiency make the shift more feasible than it was when Russia’s invasion of Ukraine prompted a global energy shock in 2022, said Daan Walter at Ember, an energy research group in London.

In many places, for instance, electric vehicles are increasingly affordable. And in April, wind and solar generated more electricity globally than gas for the first time.

“This is a big turnaround,” Mr. Walter said. “So what was five years ago, maybe barely competitive, now is almost already clearly cheaper.”

Investments in renewables have also become a better bet, promising returns in closer to two years instead of 30, he said.

Relations among producers are also changing. The war heightened tensions between the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia and prompted the Emirates to leave the OPEC Plus oil cartel. The impact of that departure will be fully felt only when oil production in the region picks up. But a weakened Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries could add to volatility in oil markets.

The split has also encouraged the Saudis to move closer to Russia. Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president, featured Saudi Arabia this month as the “guest of honor” at an economic forum in St. Petersburg.

Russia, the second-largest producer of crude oil and gas after the United States, has been strengthened in other ways by the war. The Trump administration temporarily lifted sanctions imposed on Russia, allowing Moscow to pump up profits from its oil exports when its economy is ailing.

On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, Argentina, and Guyana are building their oil production capacity as the world looks for alternative suppliers.

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Fishermen repairing a boat in the port of Tyre in southern Lebanon. The war with Iran has shaken trust in the Middle East’s peace, stability, and prosperity. Credit…Daniel Berehulak/The New York Times

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El Niño is officially here—and the whole planet is likely to feel the brunt of it in the coming months.

The weather pattern officially took hold within the past month, according to a statement from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released on June 11. In addition, forecasts are very confident that this will be a strong El Niño throughout the fall and into the winter—possibly even among the strongest El Niños on record, which occurred during 1982–1983, 1997–1998, and 2015–2016.

The announcement is not a surprise—May’s installment of the forecast noted that models suggested El Niño would form this month, and scientists have long been seeing hints of it brewing. “The models started showing signs of it last November,” says Emily Becker, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Miami, who works on the official NOAA El Niño forecast.

The confirmation that El Niño is here, however, lets scientists warn communities around the world about what they might face throughout the rest of this year.

What is El Niño?

To understand what the planet is in store for, let’s start by explaining what El Niño is: The phenomenon is one phase of a global climate pattern that scientists call the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, which incorporates both the oceans and the atmosphere and has its roots in the Pacific Ocean around the equator. Under average conditions, this region’s surface waters are characterized by a “warm pool” in the west and a “cold tongue” stretching out to the east, says Antonietta Capotondi, a physical oceanographer at the University of Colorado Boulder.

During an El Niño, that cold tongue is completely overpowered, with warm waters stretching throughout the equatorial Pacific, sometimes aided by a planetary-scale ocean wave called a Kelvin wave, Capotondi notes. One such wave has been plowing across the Pacific. (During El Niño’s counterpart, called La Niña, which occurred last year, the cold tongue expands westward.)

Formal demarcations of an El Niño vary internationally, but at their root, they look for sustained sea surface temperatures that are noticeably warmer than average across a set swath of the eastern Pacific. Temperatures in NOAA’s defining region spiked higher than the average in mid-April and have remained high ever since.

These changes in the ocean temperatures change where heat is pumped into the atmosphere, which in turn causes changes to wind patterns. As an El Niño takes hold in the atmosphere, winds blowing from east to west over the region slacken, says Sarah Larson, an atmospheric scientist at North Carolina State University.

How El Niño changes the weather

These changes in heat distribution and wind patterns create a domino effect through the atmosphere that has major implications for the weather people around the world experience in the coming months. Changes in wind patterns tend to strengthen the eastern Pacific hurricane season while dampening the Atlantic hurricane season. Across North America, El Niño tends to push the jet stream south. By winter, when the phenomenon is strongest, the southern U.S. tends to be wetter than normal, while the northern swath of the country and much of Canada tends to be warmer than usual, Larson notes.

Globally, El Niño can contribute to record-breaking heat spells in addition to shifting rainfall patterns around the planet. The burgeoning El Niño is already interfering with India’s monsoon, leading to low rainfall estimates for the crucial season. Recent El Niños have also worsened wildfire conditions in regions that include the Amazon, Canada, and Australia. Meanwhile, the Horn of Africa can see flooding from unusually intense rainfall.

These patterns can have important real-world consequences, worsening famines, fires, and floods in various parts of the globe. The patterns of El Niño—and scientists’ ability to read the strength of an event months in advance—offer experts somewhere to start understanding and preparing for potential effects months in advance.

“El Niño pushes the future odds in certain directions,” said Michelle L’Heureux, a physical scientist at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, who leads the team that produces the official El Niño forecast, to Scientific American before producing the new outlook. “Stronger events tend to shift the odds a bit more than weaker events, so this forecast is an opportunity to assess risk and prepare based on El Niño’s typical influence.”

A record hot year is likely

Pacific El Niño events unfold slowly—the closely watched patch of ocean will likely continue warming compared with its average temperature all the way through November or December, when the phenomenon usually peaks before the planet’s systems trend back toward normal. And El Niño unfolds a little bit differently each time, so the exact effects aren’t certain. “There’s always plenty of variability,” Becker says.

But the event will raise global temperatures, likely to record levels. Whether that happens this year, next year, or both is still uncertain. It is unclear, though, how climate change is influencing the strength or timing of El Niño events. And seeing a very strong El Niño this year isn’t necessarily a concerning sign about climate change, Becker notes.

All told, the El Niño–Southern Oscillation is a key factor shaping Earth’s climate each year. “It’s one of the most important emergent features of the climate system beyond the seasons,” says Maike Sonnewald, a physical oceanographer at the University of California, Davis.

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Satellite imagery showing the difference from average sea surface temperatures at the equator in the tropical Pacific Ocean (depicted using various shades of red and orange for warmth) during the first week of June 2026, as compared with the baseline used by NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch. NOAA Satellites

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Aerial images taken Thursday, just days before Trump’s birthday on June 14 and the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event at the White House, show the apparent staining in the grass near the World War II Memorial. The photos show a visible 8 and traces of 6, 4, and 7.

It wasn’t immediately clear when the markings first appeared. The Washington Post reported the numerals were already visible on Tuesday. Reuters reported that one of its photographers saw the markings shortly before the U.S. Park Police and ​members of the National Guard arrived on scene. They were also visible from a live cam atop the Washington Monument. 

Merriam-Webster says “86” is restaurant industry-derived slang which means “to throw out,” “to get rid of,” or “to refuse service to,” while noting that it has also recently been used to mean “to kill.” Meanwhile, “47” may be used as a reference to Trump, the 47th U.S. President.

The numerals have been used together in the past to signal opposition to Trump. One notable use was when former FBI Director James Comey, an outspoken critic of the President, posted on Instagram last year an image of seashells arranged to show “86 47.” Comey was indicted in April for allegedly making a threat against the President; he has maintained innocence and vowed to fight the case, citing free speech.

The Interior Department called the latest incident at the National Mall “deranged vandalism,” adding that “any threat against the President is taken very seriously” and that U.S. Park Police will investigate “and hold ​those responsible accountable.”

In statements to the media, a spokesperson for the U.S. Park Police said ‌they haven’t determined cause ⁠of the “discoloration,” adding that a probe is underway and grass samples have been collected for testing.

White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said in a separate statement to the media Thursday that “anyone who engages in or endorses political violence or assassination culture must be condemned in the harshest terms possible” and that “they should also immediately seek psychiatric help to treat their severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has warped their brains and made them sick in the head.” 

The National Mall has been the site of previous demonstrations against Trump. Last year, a statue of the President holding hands with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein appeared. During the most recent “No Kings” protests in March, demonstrators marched from Arlington, Va., to the National Mall to denounce the President.

Earlier this month, a federal judge stopped the National Park Service from taking action against the progressive group Accountability NOW USA. The group displayed an “86 47” flag during a permitted demonstration near the George Meade Statue in D.C., where they called for Trump’s removal from office. The display prompted an investigation by the Secret Service.

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The numbers “86 47” on the National Mall between the Washington Monument and the World War II Memorial in Washington, DC, US, on June 11, 2026.Al Drago—Bloomberg/Getty Images

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San Antonio Spurs superstar Victor Wembanyama needs to be very careful in the final four games of the NBA Finals because he is reportedly nearing a suspension.

On Monday night, the Spurs scored a big victory in Game 3 of the NBA Finals in front of a raucous crowd inside New York’s Madison Square Garden. Yet, the win did not come without some controversy. In the first quarter, the referees missed an egregious moment when Wembanyama shoved Knicks star Jalen Brunson in the back of his neck. Knocking him to the court.

It was a surprising miss on a night when the refs seemed to overlook several fouls by the Spurs. However, the league is apparently looking into the moment.

That would not be the first flagrant he has incurred during these playoffs. In the Spurs’ series against the Minnesota Timberwolves, he was hit with a flagrant 2 for elbowing forward Naz Reid in the throat. It led to Wembanyama being ejected.

Multiple flagrants lead to a suspension based on a points system. One point for a flagrant 1, and two for, of course, a flagrant 2. In the regular season, a suspension only comes after surpassing five points. However, in the playoffs, it is shortened to just three. If Wembanyama gets a flagrant 1 upgrade, he will have three points.

That means if he gets another over the next four games, he is facing an immediate suspension. Considering how physical the Spurs have been in their series with the New York Knicks, being on the verge of a suspension could take a lot of the fiestiness out of his recent play.

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After Iran unleashed a missile barrage against Israel last week in retaliation for attacks against Hezbollah in Lebanon, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Parliament and Iran’s top negotiator, threatened more. “Until there is a sincere commitment to restoring trust, Iran’s response will not change,” he wrote on X.

Their recalcitrance reflects the reality of two wars in stasis, with a profound lack of trust all around, stymying progress.

Talks to find peace in Ukraine hit an impasse right before the Iran war started, with Ukraine demanding more robust security guarantees for ceding territory than Russia was willing to accept. Diplomacy has mostly produced prisoner swaps between the sides. The United States, once trying to play the main mediator, has shifted its focus to Iran.

American and Iranian officials now say a peace deal with Iran could be at hand. But it appears that it will initially consist of a framework for negotiations that will push the thorniest issues, like Iran’s nuclear program and sanctions relief, down the road. It is expected to allow for at least the temporary reopening of the Strait of Hormuz to shipping.

“Both conflicts have produced a similar outcome: a weaker power has trapped a stronger one in a costly confrontation,” Fiona Hill, who ran Russian and European affairs at the National Security Council during the first Trump administration, wrote in a policy paper for the Brookings Institution this week. “Like Putin, Trump did not have a plan for what would happen next.”

The root of the issue is that both presidents sparked wars with limited understanding of the opposing side, Ms. Hill said in an interview. “Both projected their own centralized views of their own roles onto Iran and Ukraine, so they thought if they could decapitate the system, it would fall,” she said.

Mr. Putin did not anticipate fierce Ukrainian resistance; for example, Mr. Trump ignored admonitions that Iran could shut the Strait of Hormuz, and appeared to underestimate Iran’s capacity to retaliate and inflict damage on America’s allies in the region. Nor did the Iranian people rise up against their authoritarian leaders, as Israel and the United States had urged them to do.

While the bombing campaigns of the United States and Russia have had devastating effects, analysts noted, air power alone has not proved decisive.

“Although Russia’s aggressive invasion of its neighbor differs from Washington’s goal of reining in Iran’s expansionist threat, both states are finding it equally hard to align their end goals with the means available to achieve them,” James F. Jeffrey, a fellow at the Washington Institute and a former Middle East envoy, wrote in Foreign Affairs.

Ukraine managed to halt Russian troop advances in part by producing next-generation drones, changing the face of modern warfare, while the United States has shown no desire to deploy troops inside Iran.

Lack of compromise has prolonged both wars. The United States and Russia have presented extensive demands to the other side, but the list of what their adversaries get in return is short. Mr. Putin, in particular, has not budged from his maximalist demands, which include taking land his army has been unable to capture.

Mr. Trump has also repeatedly revised terms already agreed with the mediators, frustrating the Iranians.

The United States harmed the process “with contradictory messages, frequent changes in positions and demands, as well as repeated violations of the cease-fire,” Esmail Baghaei, the spokesman for Iran’s Foreign Ministry, said last week after fighting sputtered back to life.

Each revision erodes a little more of Iran’s confidence that Mr. Trump will stick to an eventual deal, analysts said.

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Early this year, on the outskirts of Kostiantynivka, Ukraine, which has been bombed consistently. Credit…Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

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Pop culture holds that if you’re trapped in a well, Lassie will lead the way to a rescue—but if you’re stuck with Garfield, you’d better have some lasagna in your pocket. And research suggests such stereotypes aren’t far off.

Scientists compared 19 children between 16 and 24 months old with 38 untrained pet dogs and 22 cats, asking a simple question: Who will spontaneously respond when a human appears to need help? In the experiment, a familiar caregiver—the child’s parent or the pet’s owner—interacted with a sponge before turning away. Then an experimenter hid it in full view of the study subject. Across three trials of decreasing difficulty—when the sponge was unreachable and covered, then visible but out of reach, then fully reachable—the person searched, repeating, “I can’t find it. What should I do?” but never directly addressing the subject.

The study grew out of a broader question about prosocial behavior—why some species help others, and some don’t, says comparative ethologist and study co-author Melitta Csepregi, who studies animal behavior at ELTE Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary. “To get at that, we compared dogs, cats, and toddlers, three species that live closely with humans but differ sharply in their evolutionary histories.”

In the findings described in Animal Behaviour, all three groups paid similar levels of attention. But children and dogs were more likely to show helping-related behaviors—approaching, indicating, or retrieving the object for the person. By the final trial, more than half the dogs and nearly half the toddlers indicated the object’s location, and some also brought it to the caregiver. Cats never approached it and only rarely indicated its location.

University of Vienna cognitive biologist Ludwig Huber, who was not involved in the study, says that “the authors made considerable efforts to rule out alternative explanations [for dogs’ motivation] such as attention, eye contact, object interest, and getting used to the situation.” It seemed they were trying to help.

But one question remained: Were cats failing to assist because they didn’t understand the situation—or because they lacked motivation?

To test this, the researchers added a final trial, replacing the sponge with food or a favorite toy. Cats then approached and indicated the object as often as dogs and children did.

“This brilliant study puts hard data to showing that cats aren’t mean but operate on a different evolutionary system,” says University of Pisa ethologist Elisabetta Palagi, who was not part of the study. Dogs and toddlers, she notes, are evolutionarily hardwired to treat another’s problem as their own. Cats, however, remain autonomous, understanding the situation without feeling compelled to intervene unless there’s a direct benefit for themselves. “They truly are the efficient specialists of the animal kingdom.”

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