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DISGRACE: U.S. SHIP STRIKE COULD BE WAR CRIME

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A week into their war on Iran, the United States and Israel have attacked a vast array of targets — about 4,000 in all — from the land, air, and sea.

The bombing campaign, one of the most intense periods of strikes involving U.S. forces in decades, reveals a broad strategy. The United States and Israel are seeking to loosen the grip of Iran’s repressive security and intelligence services and possibly topple its authoritarian government. They are also trying to eliminate Iran’s ability to produce and launch missiles, to seriously degrade its navy, and to prevent the country from being able to produce nuclear weapons.

President Trump said on Friday that the conflict would continue until Iran’s “unconditional surrender,” indicating that the war may just be getting started. But so far, Iran has not folded.

The bombing has killed the country’s supreme leader and other top officials, but the Islamic government that has ruled the country since 1979 remains in place. Though it has been weakened, Iran’s military is still firing missiles and drones at Israel and at countries in the region where U.S. troops are deployed. The vast Iranian security forces also appear to be intact. And while the United States and Israel have struck at least one site at the heart of Iran’s nuclear program, the extent of the damage is unclear.

 

In the first minutes of the war, Israel sought to paralyze the chain of command in Iran. Israeli warplanes fired a barrage of missiles that struck the Iranian leadership compound in central Tehran.

At the time, senior Iranian national security officials had gathered in one building at the compound. The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was in another building.

Among those who died in the attack last weekend was Ayatollah Khamenei. Israel later hunted down the highest-ranking Iranian commander responsible for operations in Lebanon, killing him in Tehran.

Mr. Trump has said that several potential successors to Khamenei are now dead, and that he wants a say in the selection of Iran’s next leader. The United States and Israel are undoubtedly looking for opportunities to kill more Iranian officials they want out of the picture.

The bombing campaign has targeted the security and intelligence agencies responsible for the repression of dissent in Iran. The aim is to weaken the regime’s grip on power.

Among the targets is Iran’s most powerful military force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the Basij, a plainclothes militia affiliated with the Guards. Israel said it had used dozens of warplanes in one attack to blast a compound in eastern Tehran that served as the headquarters for the Basij, the Guards, and the Quds Force, the arm of the Guards responsible for foreign operations.

Israel estimates that hundreds of Basij and Guards personnel have been killed, along with thousands of other security personnel. The Pentagon said it had bombed sites linked to the Guards, which, along with its proxies, has targeted Americans in numerous attacks over the decades. In addition, the United States and Israel have struck detention centers and television and broadcasting facilities.

Missiles and Defense

Perhaps the most vital part of the U.S.-Israeli campaign has been the effort to establish air superiority with attacks on Iranian air defenses, missile depots and launchers, and air bases.

The Israeli military says that more than 300 Iranian missile launchers and about 150 air defense systems have been disabled, and that it was continuing to target the country’s ballistic missiles and launch sites.

The United States says it has crippled Iran’s navy, destroying 30 vessels, including a submarine. The American military used a submarine to fire a torpedo and sink an Iranian warship in the Indian Ocean, and also struck an Iranian drone carrier ship.

The aim of the naval operations is to weaken Iran’s capacity to menace shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, which carries a fifth of the world’s oil exports and significant quantities of natural gas.

Nuclear Program

The United States and Israel say they are determined to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons.

In June, the two nations carried out attacks in Iran that Mr. Trump said had “destroyed” the country’s nuclear potential. But U.S. and Israeli forces have resumed striking the Iranian nuclear infrastructure, attacking the Natanz site, where Iran has produced a vast majority of its nuclear fuel.

The site is considered the heart of the country’s nuclear program. Satellite imagery shows that the new strikes destroyed the entrances to an underground cavern at Natanz that held centrifuges for uranium enrichment. It is not clear whether Isfahan and Fordo, two other sites that were struck in the 12-day war between Israel and Iran in June, have been targeted again.

This week, Israel destroyed a previously secret underground facility in Minzadehei, northeast of Tehran, that it said was used to develop parts for a nuclear weapon. Yechiel Leiter, the Israeli ambassador to Washington, said Iran had “intended to pair nuclear-enriched uranium with a missile delivery system” at the compound.

More on the Fighting in the Middle East

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• Leadership Rift in Iran: Masoud Pezeshkian, the Iranian president, apologized for Iranian strikes on Gulf states before backtracking after criticism from other Iranian leaders. Despite his remarks, Iran has continued its attacks.

• U.S. Assessment on Regime Change: A report by the National Intelligence Council completed before the United States and Israel launched attacks on Iran assessed that even a large-scale military assault on the country would be unlikely to topple its theocratic government, according to U.S. officials briefed on the work.

• Iran’s Navy: The country’s naval forces have suffered heavy losses in the first week of U.S. and Israeli strikes, according to a New York Times analysis of satellite data and videos. But challenges remain for U.S. and Israeli forces seeking to neutralize it completely.

• Europe’s Role: European leaders are facing diplomatic headwinds and criticism at home as they take part in a conflict they did not seek.

• Russia Sharing Intel with Iran: The information has included satellite imagery showing the locations of military personnel, according to U.S. officials. But some officials played down the significance of the partnership.

• Food Production:  The Persian Gulf is a major source of fertilizers, making the conflict disruptive to the global production of food. And those in the most vulnerable countries could face hunger.

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Sources: Satellite images by Vantor (first three images) and Planet Labs (bottom right). The New York Times

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A continental collision trapped oil within what is today Iran. The same collision explains why that oil is trapped behind the Strait of Hormuz now.

One fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas shipments typically pass through the narrow Strait of Hormuz on their way out of the Persian Gulf. But the Strait was effectively closed soon after the U.S. and Israel began attacks on Iran on February 28, causing oil and gas prices to spike and setting off concerns of a looming energy crisis.

It’s a geopolitical predicament but also a geological one. The reason for such a tight exit from the Gulf also explains why the region has such rich oil and gas deposits in the first place: a continental collision millions of years in the making.

Iran sits on the line where the Arabian tectonic plate, which hosts Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf, crunches into the Eurasian plate. This continent-to-continent crash has rucked up the earth to form the Zagros, a long line of mountains in Iran that push down on the Arabian plate and flex it like a bent ruler. The flexing creates a low point in Earth’s crust called a foreland basin, which traps massive amounts of hydrocarbons. This basin also collects water, creating the long, narrow Persian Gulf.

“It’s a combination of geological facts that leads to these huge oil and gas reserves in the Middle East on both sides of the Persian Gulf,” says Mark Allen, a professor of Earth sciences at Durham University in England. 

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Do you remember how exciting it was when you learned to say supercalifragilisticexpialidocious? Didn’t you feel smart? Just because you’re older, doesn’t mean acronyms and emojis should be your main form of communication. After all, if you want to be successful in life, you have to make an unforgettable first impression.

Why Word Choice Is Important

Having a strong vocabulary allows you to communicate in a thoughtful and intelligent way. Whether you’re trying to land a job, impress your 3rd-period teacher, or nail a scholarship interview, your ability to choose your words carefully will help you stand out. But here’s something to consider: overusing complex language can turn people off, so it’s best to test out a few new words at a time and see what kind of reaction you get.

Chances are, you’ve seen (or maybe even used) a few of these words. And while there are hundreds of words that can make you sound smarter, some are definitely more fun (and easier) than others to use. So, the next time you’re toe-to-toe with your AP English teacher, ditch the toady act and impress her with a few of these scintillating words instead.

Words to Add to Your Vocabulary

1. Accolade: a mark of acknowledgement; an honor.
   Even though he received numerous accolades at the senior awards night, Ben is still one of the most humble people I know.

• Acquiesce: to go along with something without protest, even if you don’t really want to.My grandma loves the ballet and bought tickets for us to go. I really wanted to watch the basketball game, but her sweet smile eventually caused me to acquiesce.

• Bamboozle: conceal one’s true motives; to cheat or deceive another person.I got bamboozled by my buddy to buy him a pair of new shoes even though his mom picked up a pair yesterday.

• Camaraderie: trust existing between friends who spend time together; a spirit of familiarity.There was a sense of camaraderie among the soccer team after they spent two weeks together at a wilderness camp.

• Conundrum: a difficult problem.Looks like you have a bit of conundrum, but that’s what happens when you cheat on a test, and the teacher finds out.

• Idyllic: peaceful, happy, pleasing.The outdoor classroom at our school is in an idyllic location because you can see the mountain range and several acres of forest from every open window.

• Impeccable: faultless or without defect; incapable of wrongdoing.Have you ever had that one teacher who won’t accept any work unless it’s impeccable? There’s no way my essays are ever going to be that perfect.

• Perfunctory: something done without much care or attention.You did a perfunctory job, including descriptive words in this essay. Next time, I expect you to show more interest in what you are writing.

• Ruminate: to think about something thoroughly and in great detail.People who struggle with anxiety tend to ruminate and fixate on their thoughts.

• Tempestuous: identified by explosive conditions.My older brother’s tempestuous relationship with our mom has led to very little communication between the two of them.

• Tenuous: very weak or slight and likely to change.We’re not sure if our boating store is going to survive this harsh winter season. Your employment will remain a bit tenuous until we know the total number of sales from this month.

• Vacillate: to go back and forth between two points, waver between different opinions, or to be indecisive.When I ask my sister where she’s going to college, she vacillates between her two favorite schools, but I know she will eventually make the best decision for her.

• Vitriolic: harsh or corrosive in tone.The student body election turned into an argument reaching vitriolic levels. The two candidates ended their speeches by shouting harmful words at each other.

• Wheelhouse: a metaphor for an individual’s area of comfort or expertise.I need you to cover this story about the construction at our school, even though it’s not in your wheelhouse.

• Zealous: displaying or feeling energetic support for a person, cause, etc.My neighbor has been a zealous supporter of animal rights for as long as I’ve known her.

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In Donald Trump’s fantasy world, America is invincible and impregnable.

Its military is so advanced and skillful that it can pluck a sitting head of state from a hostile country and deposit him in a New York City jail cell without losing a single soldier. It can slap punitive tariffs on any nation it likes, abandon longstanding alliances on a whim, bomb any country at any time, and freely blow up boats it may suspect of carrying drugs. America’s awesome power means it is unfettered by any rules, untroubled by any consequences. As an unfathomably rich and sprawling nation, blessed by geography and protected from its enemies by two vast oceans, why shouldn’t it do what it will?

Over the past six days, as Trump plunged the United States into a war with Iran, that fantasy of omnipotence has come crashing into reality. Undertaken for unexplained and perhaps unexplainable reasons, the war is being waged in a central node of the global economy against a disciplined, well-armed opponent with nothing to lose. America and Israel killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and a dozen Iranian leaders on the first day of fighting, but Trump has clearly given little thought to what comes next. Recklessly, he has ignited a widening conflagration with no obvious end in sight. The death toll has already surpassed 1,000 people.

For America, the repercussions are just beginning. At least six American service members have been killed, and the Pentagon, pointedly not ruling out boots on the ground, has said more casualties are likely. Despite relentless attacks on Iran’s military installations, the country has responded with relentless force.

It has rained missiles and drones not only on American and Israeli targets but also on the Gulf countries — the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, chief among them — that play host to American military bases. Airports, hotels, data centers, and energy infrastructure have been struck, causing chaos. Meanwhile, the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial choke point for the export of oil and gas, is all but closed, sending shudders through energy markets.

This is the world Trump tries to disavow — complex and interconnected, resiliently interwoven and yet vulnerable to disruption. The Persian Gulf embodies it like no other place. An apotheosis of globalization, it is a crossroads of money, people, and power deeply intertwined with not just America’s fortunes but also Trump’s personal wealth. More than anything, it shows up — in its grounded flights, shuttered refineries, and intercepted missiles — the fallacy of Fortress America.

Trump neither sought nor received congressional approval, much less international support, for his war. But perhaps the most shocking thing about his cavalier approach is that he seems to have had no idea that the Gulf would be a target. In an interview with CNN on Monday, he professed that Iran’s attacks on American allies in the Gulf were “probably the biggest surprise” — despite the fact that just about every country in the region had warned his administration that Iran would surely attack them in retaliation for an American assault.

This thoughtlessness is part of a pattern. For one thing, the Trump administration has given no plausible explanation for the war, offering instead confused and contradictory justifications. Secretary of State Marco Rubio even suggested that America was effectively bounced into it by the prospect of an imminent Israeli attack on Iran. Trump soon weighed in, claiming that he was actually the one who pressured Israel into the venture. His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, perhaps offered the closest thing to the truth. “The president had a feeling,” she told reporters on Wednesday, “that Iran was going to strike the United States.”

For another, Trump appears strangely uncertain about where the war is heading. “The worst case would be we do this, and then somebody takes over who’s as bad as the previous person,” Trump mused on Tuesday, seated in his gilded Oval Office alongside Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany. “We don’t want that to happen,” he said, seeming to be considering this very real possibility for the first time. “It would probably be the worst.”

It is unsettling how often Trump affects astonishing indifference, as though the most powerful man in the world were merely a spectator to events he himself has set in motion — and who, in any case, has little investment in the outcome. But that curious passivity reveals a darker truth. Trump seems to believe that he, like his fantasy America, exists on a different plane, utterly untouchable by the swirl of global events. The devastating consequences of his actions are not just someone else’s fault. They are someone else’s problem, too.

That illusion cannot survive contact with material reality. The postwar consensus was built partly on a set of noble ideas about human rights and international law, but in truth, its backstop was economic interdependence. And not since World War II has there been a conflict that unfolded in a crucial global financial center. America’s major wars since then took place in nations that were on the economic periphery: Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq.

America’s last major foray in the Middle East casts a long shadow over the Iran war — it was, in many ways, the crucible that gave us Trump. But the Gulf is a fundamentally different place than it was when America invaded Iraq after 9/11. Disastrous as that decision was, the region had not yet become the indispensable node of the global economy that it is today.

There are the oil and gas, of course. The Gulf is home to about half of the world’s proven reserves of oil. Those are now imperiled: Scarcely any ships are getting through the Strait of Hormuz, and oil producers are running out of storage space. What’s more, one-fifth of the world’s liquid natural gas comes through the strait, primarily from Qatar. On Wednesday, that country shut down its liquefaction facilities and declared a force majeure, with potentially dire implications for importers in Europe and East Asia.

Yet alongside this resource wealth, Gulf nations have rapidly diversified in recent decades, transforming the region into a center of finance, aviation, technology, and tourism, as well as a home to tens of millions of people from across the globe. The sprawling airports and vast fleets of airliners in Dubai, Doha, and Abu Dhabi have made the region the busiest flight hub on the globe; about 80 percent of the world is an eight-hour flight away. The closure of these airports has not only stranded hundreds of thousands of travelers, including many Americans, but has also severed vital links between vast regions of the world.

Indeed, there are few people who would have better reason to appreciate the Gulf’s centrality than Trump. After all, his family’s company has struck billions of dollars of real estate deals in the region. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, got $2 billion in 2022 from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund for his private equity company. An investment firm tied to the U.A.E. purchased nearly half of the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company for $500 million just days before Trump’s inauguration last year. A few months later, Qatar gave Trump the lavish gift of a gilded Boeing 747.

That is all in peril now, as the war spreads ominously. On Tuesday, America torpedoed an Iranian warship with a crew of an estimated 180 people on board off the coast of Sri Lanka, more than 2,000 miles from Tehran. On Wednesday, NATO forces shot down a missile headed into Turkey’s airspace, prompting anxieties about NATO needing to trigger Article 5. On Thursday, Azerbaijan said multiple drones crossed its borders, injuring at least two people. Who knows what will be next.

And yet Trump presses on, declaring at one point that the war could go on “forever.” In a manic briefing on Wednesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth promised “death and destruction from the sky all day long” over Tehran, a densely populated city of about 10 million people. “This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”

Watching Hegseth rant about limitless killing, I remembered the words of the anticolonial poet and leader Aimé Césaire. “The hour of the barbarian is at hand,” he wrote in his “Discourse on Colonialism” in 1950. “The modern barbarian. The American hour. Violence, excess, waste, mercantilism, bluff, conformism, stupidity, vulgarity, disorder.”

If war is God’s way of teaching Americans geography, perhaps it will also serve as a lesson to Trump. It should be a simple one: Other places and other people are real, possessing their own agendas and agency — and America’s actions have consequences it cannot control. Anything else is pure fantasy.

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Photo Illustration by Damon Winter/The New York Times

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TerraPower, a Bill Gates–backed nuclear power start-up, received the federal green light to start building a power plant in Wyoming. The approval paves the way for the first new commercial nuclear reactor in the U.S. in nearly a decade.

On Wednesday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission unanimously voted in favor of TerraPower’s construction permit.

The start-up hopes to build smaller, more advanced nuclear reactors that the company says will help support the transition to clean energy from fossil fuels. Known as the Natrium plant, the reactor is not expected to come online until at least 2031.

Chris Levesque, TerraPower’s chief executive officer, said in a statement that the approval marked a “historic day for the United States nuclear industry.”

TerraPower claims that its reactor design will be easier and cheaper to build and bring online than older nuclear power plants—the last two reactors built in the U.S. in recent memory cost $35 billion and ran way overbudget and past schedule. TerraPower will still need to clear multiple other regulatory hurdles before it can come online.

A key difference between TerraPower’s reactor design and older plants is that older reactors pump water through protective shields and heavy, thick pipes into the reactor core, where it is heated through nuclear fission. The resulting steam then creates electricity. TerraPower’s design uses liquid sodium, which doesn’t reach such high pressures as water, reducing the cost of shielding. And the start-up’s plant will be outfitted with a battery storage system that will enable it to ramp up or down electricity production as needed—something older reactors can’t easily do.

The Trump administration has touted nuclear power as a potential solution for the U.S.’s rapidly rising energy demands, which are set to become more acute as planned data centers to power artificial intelligence come online.

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The challenge for modern marketers is not whether to trust the data, but how to translate it into work that still feels human.

Key Takeaways

• Modern marketing has shifted from simple messaging to utilizing real-time data and algorithms for strategic insights.
• Effective marketers balance data analytics with human creativity to ensure campaigns resonate on a personal level.
• While AI can enhance understanding and streamline marketing, emotional intelligence and brand authenticity remain key.

Marketing used to be a simple equation: Brands speak, and people respond. What has changed is how clearly we can see behavior. Today’s marketers operate in an environment shaped by algorithms that surface signals in real time, showing us what resonates, what converts, and where attention is moving. Data is no longer a support function. It is the foundation of modern marketing.

Search engines, social platforms, and recommendation systems now influence not only how content is distributed, but how it is conceived. They reveal patterns at a scale that instinct alone never could. Used well, these systems make marketing more intentional, measurable, and responsive.

Insight alone, however, does not create a connection. Algorithms can tell us what is working, but they cannot explain why something matters to a person on the other side of the screen. The challenge for modern marketers is not whether to trust the data, but how to translate it into work that still feels human.

When machines became the audience

Most marketers understand that algorithms dictate distribution. What is less obvious is how deeply these systems have reshaped the creative process itself.

Many campaigns now start with a spreadsheet. The risk is not starting with data, but mistaking signals for strategy. When the first step is identifying high-volume keywords or analyzing last month’s engagement patterns, teams risk designing campaigns around signals instead of the people those signals represent. Creative direction has not lost its soul, but its starting point has shifted.

Data has become the compass by which we navigate ideas. It tells us what resonates, when platforms might boost or bury content and which signals matter most. This is not inherently bad. In fact, data gives us intention. But when algorithms are treated as the audience instead of the translation layer, creativity collapses into compliance.

I see this pattern often. A team identifies a clear performance signal, a headline format, a visual style or a message that begins outperforming everything else. Instead of interrogating why it works, they replicate it across channels. Engagement holds briefly, then fades as audiences tune it out. In contrast, some teams use the signal as a clue rather than a conclusion. They look for the underlying emotion or tension driving response and express it in new ways. The algorithm sees continuity, while the audience experiences something that still feels fresh.

For marketers willing to adapt, this shift has created an opportunity to build smarter, more responsive creative systems.

The optimization trap

Automation has made marketing faster and more measurable. It has also raised the stakes.

A/B testing, performance dashboards, and continuous optimization allow teams to iterate at unprecedented speed. Used well, these tools sharpen ideas and improve outcomes. Used poorly, they flatten creative work into a series of safe, repeatable patterns.

I have watched brands with strong personalities slowly sand down their edges in the name of performance. They stop telling stories and start checking boxes. Before long, their voice becomes interchangeable with everyone else in their category. You could swap the logos on half the ads in your feed and not notice.

Optimization is not the problem. When optimization becomes the goal instead of the tool, creativity starts to converge. Data should sharpen creativity by giving it direction, not by dictating outcomes. The challenge for modern marketers is not choosing between performance and originality, but learning how to scale one without erasing the other.

The human cost of machine marketing

Consumers are exhausted. Engagement rates are down, scroll speeds are up, and attention spans are shrinking, not because people suddenly lost interest in brands, but because they are drowning in sameness.

Audiences can spot content that has been calibrated for clicks instead of connection. Every time a brand chooses algorithmic safety over originality, it widens the gap between itself and the humans it is trying to reach. People want presence. They respond to brands that show up with consistency, honesty, and a clear point of view.

AI can help us listen better and respond faster, but it cannot replace empathy. Trust is built through relevance, repetition and restraint. In an environment saturated with signals, meaning becomes the differentiator.

Reclaiming marketing for people

The solution is not abandoning algorithms. They are here to stay. The opportunity is learning how to lead with them, without letting them flatten what makes a brand distinct.

AI can deepen our understanding of audiences and remove friction from execution. It can surface insights no human team could find on its own. But it is a lens, not a decision-maker. It should inform creativity, not dictate it.

To bring emotional intelligence back into AI-powered systems, marketers must translate insight into narrative. Creativity and technology are not at odds. They speak different languages. AI brings scale, speed, and precision. Humans bring judgment, memory, and meaning.

When those forces work together, brands can perform without becoming generic.

The future of creative leadership in a performance-driven world

Strong leaders start with data to understand what is working, what is shifting, and where attention is moving. They pair that intelligence with clear brand guardrails that define how insights turn into ideas.

The most effective teams operate with speed because they have both signal and structure. Data provides direction, but clarity around voice, values, and boundaries ensures execution does not collapse into repetition. That balance allows teams to launch, test, and iterate without reshaping the brand every time a metric fluctuates. Performance data informs decisions, but it does not replace creative conviction.

Algorithms can accelerate reach and efficiency, but they only amplify what already exists. Meaning, trust and memorability still come from human judgment, from what leaders choose to say, what they ignore, and how consistently they show up. In a machine-led world, the advantage is not choosing between performance and humanity. It is knowing how to operationalize both at the same time.

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The conflict in Iran may give Moscow a short-term boost economically and in Ukraine. But it has also shown the limits of Russia’s partnerships.

One early beneficiary of the full-scale U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran has been President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

His government is profiting from higher oil and gas prices that could ease Russia’s economic woes. He is throwing around the country’s geopolitical weight as an alternative energy supplier. And he stands to gain on his own battlefield if the Middle East conflict strains the supply of U.S.-made air defenses for Ukraine.

But Mr. Putin is also grappling with the arrival of a new world of unbridled American power under President Trump, which is checking Russia’s global influence and ripping up Moscow’s playbook for partnerships abroad.

For years, Mr. Putin supported anti-American authoritarian governments in Iran, Venezuela and Cuba, with little worry that Washington would use its overwhelming military power to kill, capture or push out their leaders. That has now changed, as Mr. Trump has demonstrated a willingness to disregard international norms and engage in foreign adventurism by fully exploiting Washington’s might.

Even though Iran came to Russia’s aid with critical drones at the outset of Mr. Putin’s bungled invasion of Ukraine four years ago, Russia has stood aside as the United States and Israel have pummeled Iran’s leadership and military. Moscow has issued little more than condemnatory statements that largely avoid naming Mr. Trump.

“It shows the limits of, ‘What does it mean to be a partner of Russia?’” said Angela Stent, a Russia expert and professor emerita at Georgetown University. She said the case of Iran was particularly stark given Tehran’s pivotal role in aiding Moscow in Ukraine.

The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, said on Thursday that Moscow had not received any requests for assistance from Iran and that “the war that’s going on isn’t our war.”

Washington’s actions against Russia-friendly leaders have come at a head-spinning pace.

The last two months have brought the U.S.-Israeli killing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; the U.S. capture of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela; and a U.S. economic blockade intended to oust the Cuban president, Miguel Díaz-Canel. In every case, Russia has offered little help.

An American president pursuing foreign heads of state in their homes and offices, unchecked by Congress, has also flipped the script on Mr. Putin, who has made his appetite for risk, willingness to use force and unpredictability central to his coercive power in the world.

“Now he’s no longer the baddest guy in town,” said Bobo Lo, a Russia analyst and former Australian diplomat in Moscow.

“He no longer is able to strike fear in the way that he had hoped. That mantle has gone over to Trump,” Mr. Lo said. “And so Putin looks, in a way, a little bit pathetic.”

The reality is that there is not much that Russia, already tied down in Ukraine, could have done to protect Iran, short of declaring war on the United States or Israel, said Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, a research institute in Berlin.

Iran was already weakened by an economic and political crisis, the backdrop to failures that allowed the United States and Israel to kill Khamenei in the conflict’s opening hours.

“Given the intelligence penetration of Iran that was revealed, there was very little that Russia, even in tandem with China, could have done to undo this,” Mr. Gabuev said.

But while Mr. Putin may be holding back now, he can play a longer game. Mr. Trump has made clear that he does not necessarily intend to unseat the Russia-friendly elites in the countries where he has intervened and engage in “democracy building.” That leaves open the possibility for Mr. Putin to keep ties with them.

Russia has also seen that Mr. Trump’s second-term impulses in foreign affairs can cut both ways.

Mr. Trump has asserted U.S. power in nations that Mr. Putin considers his own backyard, including by hosting Central Asian leaders and brokering a peace pledge between Azerbaijan and Armenia. But in other cases Mr. Trump’s actions have benefited the Kremlin beyond its dreams.

Mr. Trump’s public Oval Office showdown with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine last year elated Moscow. So did Mr. Trump’s dismantling of U.S.A.I.D., which the Kremlin long viewed as an American tool for foreign meddling, and the U.S. president’s attacks against Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

And Mr. Trump’s threats this year to take Greenland from Denmark risked rupturing NATO from within, advancing Mr. Putin’s longstanding goal of destroying the Western military alliance.

Mr. Putin has been withholding any public criticism of Mr. Trump as the Russian leader tries to secure what is most important to him: his desired outcome in Ukraine.

In an interview with Politico on Thursday, Mr. Trump once again took aim at Mr. Zelensky, not Mr. Putin, as the obstacle to peace. Though Ukrainian forces took more territory than they lost in the last two weeks of February, the first such gain since 2023, according to the Institute for the Study of War, Mr. Trump repeated what he had said to Mr. Zelensky a year ago in the Oval Office: “You don’t have the cards.”

More on the Assault on Iran

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• School Hit by Strikes in Iran: A body of evidence assembled by The New York Times — including newly released satellite imagery, social media posts and verified videos — indicates the school building was severely damaged on February 28 by a precision strike that occurred at the same time as attacks on an adjacent naval base operated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

• Stranded Americans: The State Department is battling accusations from diplomats and travelers who say the Trump administration endangered U.S. citizens in the Middle East by beginning a war against Iran without adequate plans for helping Americans leave the region.

• U.S. Struck Iranian Warship:  Iran’s foreign minister accused the United States of committing an “atrocity at sea” after an American submarine torpedoed an Iranian frigate off the southern coast of Sri Lanka. The United States has long considered Iranian naval ships a serious threat.

• U.S. Public Opinion: About 60 percent of Americans disapproved of the attacks on Iran, according to a CNN poll conducted immediately after the strikes. Two other polls, by Reuters/Ipsos and The Washington Post, had similar results.

• A Distorted View of War: Iranian state media and online propagandists are striking a confident posture, despite heavy losses. Some of the content was generated by artificial intelligence.

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President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia went to a wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Moscow last month. Credit…Pool photo by Maxim Shipenkov

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Last September, roboticist Benjie Holson posted the “Humanoid Olympic Games”: a set of increasingly difficult tests for humanoid robots that he demonstrated himself while dressed in a silver bodysuit. The challenges, such as opening a door with a round doorknob, started out easy, at least for a human, and progressed to “gold medal” tasks such as properly buttoning and hanging up a men’s dress shirt and using a key to open a door.

Holson’s point was that the hard tasks aren’t the dazzling ones. While other competitions feature robots playing sports and dancing, Holson argued that the robots we actually want are the ones that can do laundry and cook meals.

He expected the challenges to take years to resolve. Instead, within months, robotics company Physical Intelligence completed 11 of the 15 challenges—from bronze to gold—with a robot that washed windows, spread peanut butter, and used a dog poop bag.

Scientific American spoke to Holson about why vision-only, or camera-based, systems are outperforming his expectations and how close we are to a genuinely useful machine. He has since released a new, more difficult set of challenges.

You designed these challenges to be hard. Were you surprised by how quickly the results came in?

It was so much faster than I was expecting. When I chose the challenges, I was trying to calibrate them so some bronze ones would get done in the first month or two, then silver and gold in the next six months, and the most difficult ones might take a year or a year and a half. To have them do basically almost all of them in the first three months is wild.

What made that possible?

I started with the premise that we have things that look impressive at a fairly narrow set of tasks—vision-only, no touch, simple manipulator, not incredible precision. That limits what you can be good at. I tried to think of tasks that would require us to break forward out of that set. It turns out I wildly underestimated what’s possible with vision-only and simple manipulators.

When I visited Physical Intelligence, I learned they don’t have any force sensing. They’re doing all of that 100 percent vision-based. The key-insertion task, the peanut butter spreading—I thought those would require force inputs. But apparently, you just throw more video demonstrations at it, and it works.

How exactly do you train a robot to do that without coding it line by line?

It’s all learning from demonstration. Somebody teleoperates the robot doing the task hundreds of times, they train a model based on that, and then the robot can do the task.

There is a lot of confusion about whether large language models (LLMs) are useless for robots. Are they?

I used to be fairly dubious of the utility of LLMs in robotics. The problem they were good at solving two or three years ago was high-level planning—“If I want to make tea, what are the steps?” Ordering the steps is the easy part. Picking up the teapot and filling it is the really challenging thing.

On the other hand, we’ve started doing vision-action models using the same transformer architecture [as that used in LLMs]. You can use transformers for text in, text out, images in, text out—but also images in, robot actions out.

The neat thing is they’re starting with models pretrained on text, images, maybe video. Before you even start training your specific task, the AI already understands what a teapot is, what water is, that you might want to fill a teapot with water. So while training your task, it doesn’t have to start from, “Let me figure out what geometry is.” It can start with, “I see, we’re moving teapots around”—which is wild that it works.

How did you come up with the “Olympic” tasks?

So part of it was a challenge, and part of it was a prediction. I tried to think of the next set of things that we can’t do now that someone’s going to be able to do soon.

Humans rely on touch to do things such as finding keys in a pocket. How do we get around that in robotics?

That’s a very good question, we don’t know the answer to yet. Touch technology is way worse, more expensive, delicate, and far behind cameras. Cameras, we’ve been working on for a long time.

The big question is: Are cameras enough? Both Physical Intelligence and Sunday Robotics [which completed the bronze-medal task of rolling matched socks] have made the bet that putting a camera on the wrist, very close to the fingers, lets you kind of see forces by seeing how everything smushes. When the robot grabs something, it sees the fingers have some rubber that deflects; the object deflects, and it infers forces from that. When smearing peanut butter on bread, the robot watches the knife deflect down and crush the bread and judges forces from that. It works way better than I expected.

What about safety?

The energy needed to stay balanced is often quite high. If a robot is falling, that’s a very fast, hard acceleration to get the leg in front in time. Your system has to inject a lot of energy into the world—and that’s what’s unsafe.

I’m a huge fan of centaur robots—mobile wheel base with arms and a head. For safety, that’s such an easier way to get there quickly. If a humanoid loses power, it’s going to fall down. The general plan seems like it’s to make a robot so incredibly valuable that we as a society create a new safety class for it—like bicycles and cars. They’re dangerous but so valuable that we tolerate the risk.

Have these results changed your time line?

I used to think home robots were at least 15 years away. Now I think at least six. The difference is I thought it would be much longer before doing a useful thing in a human space, even as a demo, was plausible.

But roboticists have seen time and again there’s a long road between “it worked in a lab and I got a video” and “I can sell a product.” Waymo was driving on roads in 2009; I couldn’t buy a ride until 2024. It takes a long time to get reliability squared away.

What’s the biggest bottleneck left?

Reliability and safety—the stuff Physical Intelligence shows is incredibly impressive, but if you put it on a different table with different lighting and use a different sock, it might not work. Each step toward generalization seems to take an order of magnitude more data, turning days of data collection into weeks or months.

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Republican lawmakers on Wednesday blocked a measure that would have restricted President Trump’s authority to continue military operations against Iran without congressional approval, even as the conflict widened into a fast‑moving international crisis.

What To Know

• Senate Republicans rejected a War Powers effort that sought to force congressional oversight of the expanding Iran campaign; only Senator Rand Paul broke with his party.
• The vote came as NATO air defenses intercepted an Iranian ballistic missile headed toward Turkish airspace, raising fears of a broader regional spillover.
• U.S. officials said American and Israeli forces would intensify strikes, with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claiming their aircraft would soon dominate Iranian airspace.
• Israel launched another wave of attacks on Tehran late Wednesday, marking the fifth consecutive day of coordinated U.S.-Israeli operations.
• Turkey confirmed the intercepted missile originated from Iran, though its intended target remains unclear.
• China announced it would dispatch a special envoy to the Middle East as global concern deepened; several European nations deployed military assets to protect their citizens.
• Israel ordered mass evacuations in southern Lebanon as it escalated strikes on Hezbollah positions north of the Litani River.
• Financial markets steadied after days of volatility, though U.S. gas prices continued to rise amid fears of prolonged conflict.
• Iran’s death toll climbed to 787, according to the Red Crescent, including at least 175 killed in a strike on a girls’ elementary school.
• U.S. officials confirmed six American service members have died in the conflict, including four Army Reserve soldiers killed in a drone attack in Kuwait.
• Iranian leaders are weighing successors to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, with his son Mojtaba emerging as a leading candidate following the supreme leader’s assassination. at a girls’ elementary school, where a bombing killed at least 175 people, according to the organization.

Closure of Hormuz could trigger global oil shock, expert warns

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