Documents Reveal a Web of Financial Ties Between Trump Officials and the Industries They Help Regulate by Corey G. Johnson, Brandon Roberts and Al Shaw

 

ProPublica is releasing a trove of disclosure records that detail the finances of more than 1,500 Trump appointees, including former lobbyists, industry executives and at least a dozen officials who declined to identify former clients.

 

Thousands of companies are jockeying for billions of dollars in Defense Department contracts to build a shield designed to intercept and destroy missiles launched against the United States.

But amid the intense competition, a handful of firms have an important inside connection.

At least four of the companies awarded contracts so far are owned by Cerberus Capital Management, a private equity firm founded by billionaire Steve Feinberg, who until last year ran the company and is now the deputy secretary of defense — the second-highest-ranking official in the Pentagon.

Feinberg oversees the office in charge of the Golden Dome for America project, which is modeled on Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system.

Feinberg filed paperwork saying he divested from Cerberus and its related businesses. But his government ethics records contain an unusual clause: He is allowed to continue contracting with the company for tax compliance and accounting services as well as health care coverage, a financial relationship that documents show could continue indefinitely.

Feinberg’s financial statements and ethics agreement are part of a trove of nearly 3,200 disclosure records that ProPublica is making public today. The disclosures, which can be viewed in a searchable online tool, detail the finances of more than 1,500 federal officials appointed by President Donald Trump. Records for Trump and Vice President JD Vance are also included.

 

The documents reveal a web of financial ties between senior government officials and the industries they help regulate — relationships that have drawn scrutiny as Trump has dismantled ethics safeguards designed to prevent conflicts of interest.

On his first day back in office, Trump rescinded an executive order signed by President Joe Biden that required his appointees to comply with an ethics pledge. The pledge barred them from working on issues related to their former lobbying topics or clients for two years. Weeks later, Trump fired 17 inspectors general charged with investigating fraud, corruption and conflicts of interest across the federal government. Around the same time, he removed the head of the Office of Government Ethics, the agency that oversees ethics compliance throughout the executive branch. The office is currently without a head or a chief of staff.

 

Against that backdrop, ProPublica has, over the past year, used the disclosure records to investigate how personal financial interests have intersected with government decision-making inside the Trump administration.

The documents helped show that senior executive branch officials, including Attorney General Pam Bondi, made well-timed securities trades, at times selling stocks just before markets plunged because Trump announced new tariffs. (The officials either did not respond to requests for comment or said they had no insider information before they made their trades.)

Other disclosures revealed that two high-ranking scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency who recently helped downgrade the agency’s assessment of the health risks of formaldehyde had previously held senior positions at the chemical industry’s leading trade group. (The EPA said the scientists had obtained ethics advice approving their work on the project.)

In December, ProPublica reported that Trump has appointed more than 200 people who collectively owned — either by themselves or with their spouses — between $175 million and $340 million in cryptocurrency investments at the time they filed their disclosures. Some of those appointees now hold positions overseeing or influencing regulation of the crypto industry. Among them are Todd Blanche, Trump’s former criminal defense attorney and now the second-highest-ranking official in the Justice Department.

Blanche’s disclosure records show that he owned at least $159,000 in crypto-related assets last year when he shut down investigations into crypto companies, dealers and exchanges.

After ProPublica reported on Blanche’s actions, six Democratic senators accused him of a “glaring” conflict of interest, and a watchdog group asked the Justice Department’s inspector general to investigate. A Justice Department spokesperson has said Blanche upholds the highest ethical standards and that his crypto orders were “appropriately flagged, addressed and cleared in advance,” but she did not respond to questions asking who had cleared his actions.

Conflicts of interest have long plagued both Democratic and Republican administrations. But ethics experts say Trump’s second term marks a sharp break from modern norms.

Trump has openly defended his family’s financial enrichment while he is in office, including through cryptocurrency deals that critics say allow investors, including foreign entities, to curry favor by boosting the president’s personal wealth.

 

“I found out nobody cared, and I’m allowed to,” Trump told The New York Times, referring to his family’s business dealings.

Trump also remains unapologetic about accepting a Boeing 747 worth about $400 million from the Qatari government and transferring nearly $1 billion from a nuclear weapons program to retrofit it. Virginia Canter, chief counsel for ethics and corruption at Democracy Defenders Fund, a nonprofit governmental watchdog group, cited Trump’s new plane as a brazen example of self-dealing.

 

“Ethics is in the toilet,” said Canter, who served as an ethics lawyer at the White House, Treasury Department and Securities and Exchange Commission during the presidencies of George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

White House spokesperson Anna Kelly defended the president and his appointees. “President Trump is leading the most transparent administration in history,” Kelly said. “He has also nominated highly-qualified individuals across the Executive Branch who have a wide range of public and private sector backgrounds.”

 

The idea of a space-based missile defense shield has persisted ever since President Ronald Reagan proposed his own version nicknamed “Star Wars.”

Trump rekindled the idea on the campaign trail. His Golden Dome for America imagines a battery of weapons, deployed from land, sea and space, able to destroy missiles launched at the U.S.

 

In December, the Defense Department started selecting companies for the project, for which it has allocated as much as $151 billion. So far, the agency has granted awards to more than 2,000 firms. Cerberus owns or is a majority investor in at least four of them: North Wind, Stratolaunch, Red River Technology and NetCentrics Corp.

Citing national security concerns, defense officials have not publicized the amounts of each contract or the products or services the companies are providing. (The Defense Department is required by law to publicly announce only contracts worth more than $9 million.)

Feinberg, who co-founded Cerberus in 1992, listed assets worth at least $2 billion when he was nominated by Trump last year. In his ethics agreement, Feinberg said he would divest his stake in the firm, potentially giving assets to irrevocable trusts benefiting his adult children — a maneuver that is legal under federal conflict-of-interest law but one that ethics experts say undermines its intent.

Feinberg also told ethics officials that he needed to contract with Cerberus for accounting, tax and health care services in the short term but would find other providers by April 2026. However, at Feinberg’s request, Defense Department officials approved an extension earlier this year, allowing the financial relationship to continue without an end date. In an amendment to his ethics agreement, he said he would “pay customary and reasonable fees” for Cerberus’ services but did not say how much those would be.

 

It’s unclear what role Feinberg has played — or will play — in deciding which firms receive Golden Dome contracts. In response to questions from ProPublica, the Defense Department said Feinberg does not “have direct responsibility for any Golden Dome acquisitions” but did not elaborate. The department would not comment on whether Feinberg or anyone in his office had met with any contractor representatives.

What is not disputed is Feinberg’s oversight of the Golden Dome initiative. Space Force Gen. Michael Guetlein, who heads the project, reports directly to him.

Richard Painter, a former White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, said Feinberg’s ongoing relationship with Cerberus creates at least a perception of a conflict of interest that could undermine confidence in the fairness of the contracting process.

“This is what President Eisenhower worried about in the 1960s” when he railed against the military-industrial complex, Painter said of Eisenhower’s farewell address warning of the risks of a too-close relationship between the military and private defense businesses.

 

In response to questions from ProPublica, a Cerberus spokesperson said in an email: “Mr. Feinberg divested his stake in Cerberus and any funds that it manages, and is not involved with the operations of Cerberus or any of its portfolio companies in any way.” The spokesperson added that the administrative services provided to Feinberg “are unrelated to any investment activities or operations of Cerberus or its funds and were pre-approved by the Department of War’s Ethics Office and the Office of Government Ethics.”

Another top official in the department is Marc Berkowitz, who was confirmed in December as assistant secretary of defense for space policy. During his confirmation, Berkowitz described the Golden Dome project as one of his top priorities.

Berkowitz previously worked as a space industry consultant and vice president for strategic planning at Lockheed Martin. The giant defense and aerospace company was among the firms awarded Golden Dome contracts days before Berkowitz’s confirmation.

Lockheed is likely to compete for a large role in the project. The company has set up a webpage dedicated to the Golden Dome, and Reuters reported that Lockheed is one of several firms that received contracts to build competing prototypes of the missile defense system.

In his financial disclosure documents, Berkowitz reported receiving two monthly pensions from Lockheed and owning between $1 million and $5 million worth of stock in the firm.

Berkowitz agreed to divest by March 18, documents show. During his confirmation hearing, he downplayed any potential role he would have in Golden Dome contract decisions, noting that his position was more about policy.

A senior Defense Department official told ProPublica that Berkowitz is recusing himself from matters involving Lockheed until his remaining shares are sold.

 Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said the department’s ethics framework is “rigorous” and that Feinberg and Berkowitz are in full compliance with the law.

“Any claims to the contrary are fake news,” Parnell said.

 

Other agencies have similar industry links. Across the administration, former lobbyists and corporate executives now occupy influential positions, including Bondi, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy.

Their ties to former clients have made national headlines, but ProPublica’s searchable online tool provides the public an important glimpse into the financial relationships or industry links of a powerful and often hidden cadre of presidential appointees within the federal bureaucracy.

Reports show that after being nominated to head the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Jonathan Morrison revealed he served for two years as a director of the Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association, the trade group that represents companies that make and use self-driving cars. He left the position in February 2024.

 

At his confirmation hearing last year, Morrison said he wanted the NHTSA to set national standards and play a leading role in the industry’s development of self-driving vehicles.

Sean Rushton, an NHTSA spokesperson, said Morrison had an unpaid position on the autonomous vehicle group’s board of directors and doesn’t have to recuse himself from matters involving the organization because he left long before the presidential election and his nomination as highway traffic safety administrator.

Most political appointees and senior officials in the executive branch are required by law to file public financial disclosure reports. These documents detail their financial assets, the positions they hold outside government, their spouse’s holdings, their liabilities and their recent financial transactions (such as buying or selling stock) during a defined reporting period. For the most part, the law does not require appointees to provide exact financial values but instead a range.

At least a dozen appointees withheld the identities of previous clients, ProPublica found.

Appointees are allowed to keep the name of former clients confidential under exceptional circumstances, such as when the identity is protected by a court order or revealing the name would violate the rules of a professional licensing organization. In New York and Washington, D.C., for example, the organizations that license attorneys prohibit them from revealing confidential information about a client in most situations, including if doing so would be embarrassing or is likely to be detrimental to the client. While the relationship between a client and an attorney is often made public, in some cases — if, for instance, an appointee had conducted legal defense work for a client during a nonpublic criminal investigation — the client’s identity could be withheld from the financial disclosure.

Guidelines issued by the Office of Government Ethics say that such situations are unusual and “it is extremely rare for a filer to rely on this exception for more than a few clients.”

But at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, which is responsible for tariff policy, the head of the agency, Jamieson Greer, withheld the names of more than 50 former clients from his time at King & Spalding, one of the nation’s most influential law firms. In his disclosure, Greer cited the New York and D.C. bar rules for not identifying the clients.

Greer’s senior adviser in the federal agency, Kwan Kim, previously worked as an international trade lawyer for Covington & Burling. From October 2020 to February 2025, Kim helped businesses win federal exemptions from steel and aluminum tariffs and defended companies accused by investigators of import-related crimes, according to a Covington biography that has since been taken down. Kim kept the names of 52 companies he represented secret, citing the D.C. Bar rules, the disclosure documents show.

The U.S. Trade Representative office did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment.

When the names of former clients are withheld, it becomes virtually impossible for the public to know if an official’s actions in government benefit a former client. Kedric Payne, ethics director at the nonpartisan watchdog group Campaign Legal Center, said the lack of disclosure is concerning.

“When you see these types of close connections between the regulated community and the new regulators, it raises a yellow flag,” Payne said. “Because these officials are walking an ethical tightrope where any meeting or communication with their former employer and client could become a serious conflict of interest.”

 

ProPublica’s journalists have been gathering these records for more than a year. We obtained all of the disclosures that were available from the Office of Government Ethics. Those consist of the top appointees who require Senate confirmation. To get records for people working in lower-level positions, we made requests to individual federal agencies. Some didn’t respond or responded partially; records we requested for about 1,200 people weren’t provided.

Still, ProPublica’s online tool is the most comprehensive public source of financial disclosures from across the executive branch.

 

12 ways the Trump administration dismantled civil rights law and the foundations of inclusive democracy in its first year

 By Spencer Overton 

 

One year after Donald Trump’s second inauguration, a pattern emerges. Across dozens of executive orders, agency memos, funding decisions and enforcement changes, the administration has weakened federal civil rights law and the foundations of the country’s racially inclusive democracy.

From the start, the U.S. was not built to include everyone equally. The Constitution protected and promoted slavery. Most states limited voting to white men. Congress restricted naturalized citizenship to “free white persons.” These choices were not accidents. They shaped who could belong and who could exercise political power, and they entrenched a racial political majority that lasted for generations.

That began to change in the 1960s. After decades of protest and pressure, Congress enacted laws that prohibited discrimination in employment, education, voting, immigration and housing.

 Federal agencies were charged with enforcing those laws, collecting data to identify discrimination and conditioning public funds on compliance. These choices reshaped U.S. demographics and institutions, with the current Congress “the most racially and ethnically diverse in history,” according to the Pew Research Center. The laws did not eliminate racial inequality, but they made exclusion easier to see and harder to defend.

The first year of the second Trump administration marks a sharp reversal.

 Cumulative retreat

Rather than repealing civil rights statutes outright, the administration has focused on disabling the mechanisms that make those laws work.

Drawing on over two decades of teaching and writing about civil rights and my experience directing a GW Law project on inclusive democracy, I believe this pattern reflects not isolated administrative actions but a cumulative retreat from the federal government’s role as an enforcer of civil rights law.

Over the past year, the president and his administration have taken a series of connected actions:

• On its first day in office, announced the end of all federal diversity, equity and inclusion programs, including diversity officers, equity plans and related grants and contracts.

• Shut down or sharply cut funding for federal programs aimed at reducing inequality, including offices focused on minority health, minority-owned businesses, fair federal contracting, environmental justice and closing the digital divide in broadband.

• Warned schools that diversity programs could jeopardize their federal funding, opened investigations into colleges offering scholarships to students protected under DACA – the Obama-era policy providing deportation protection for undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children – and signaled that colleges risk losing federal student aid if their accrediting agencies consider diversity.

• Revoked security clearances and access to federal buildings for employees at law firms with diversity policies. The FCC investigated media companies for promoting diversity and threatened to block mergers by companies with similar programs, leading several companies to drop their initiatives.

• Issued a government-wide memo labeling common best practices in hiring, admissions and other selection and evaluation processes – such as compiling diverse applicant pools, valuing cultural competence, considering first-generation or low-income status and seeking geographic and demographic representation – as potentially legally suspect. The memo warned that federal funding could be cut to schools, employers and state and local governments using such practices. Federal prosecutors reportedly investigated federal contractors that consider diversity, characterizing such initiatives as fraud.

• Weakened enforcement against discrimination by ordering agencies to stop using disparate impact analysis. That kind of analysis identifies disparities in outcomes, assesses whether they are justified by legitimate objectives, and intervenes when they are not. The Department of Justice, the EEOC, the National Credit Union Administration and other agencies complied and dropped disparate impact analysis. Because algorithmic systems typically operate without explicit intent, eliminating disparate impact analysis reduces federal agencies’ ability to detect and address discriminatory outcomes produced by increasingly automated government and private-sector decision-making.

• Rescinded an executive order that barred discrimination by federal contractors, required steps to ensure nondiscriminatory hiring and employment, and subjected contractors to federal compliance reviews and record-keeping. This weakened a key mechanism used since 1965 to detect and remedy workplace discrimination.

 

• Eliminated data used to track inequality, including rolling back guidance encouraging schools to collect data on racial disparities in discipline and special education. The administration also removed data used to identify racial disparities in environmental harms.

• Dismantled or sharply reduced civil rights offices across federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Social Security Administration and the Department of Education. About three-quarters of lawyers in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division left.

• Pressured the Smithsonian to remove exhibits about racial injustice, restored Confederate monuments and military base names, and barred schools and teacher training programs from including material the administration labeled divisive, such as unconscious bias.

• Declared English the nation’s only official language, repealed a requirement that federal agencies provide meaningful access to government programs and services for people with limited English proficiency, and prompted the General Services Admininistration and the departments of Justice, Education and other agencies to scale back language-assistance requirements and services.

• Attempted to limit birthright citizenship guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, and adopted practices that treat ethnicity and non-English accents as legitimate reasons for immigration stops.

The pattern is hard to miss

Taken together, these shifts have practical consequences.

When agencies stop collecting data on racial disparities, discrimination becomes harder to detect. When disparate impact analysis is abandoned, unfair practices with no legitimate purpose go unchallenged. When diversity programs are chilled through investigations and funding threats, institutions respond by narrowing opportunity. When history and language are recast as threats to unity, truth and freedom of speech and thought are suppressed and undermined.

 

Lyndon Johnson at the base of the Statue of Liberty on Oct. 3, 1965, before
signing the Immigration and Nationality Act, which prohibited racial discrimination
in the immigration process and repealed quotas heavily favoring immigration from
northern and western Europe. Yoichi Okamoto, LBJ Library

Administration officials argue that these steps are needed to prevent discrimination against white people, promote unity, ensure “colorblind equality” and comply with a Supreme Court decision that struck down affirmative action in college admissions. But that ruling did not ban awareness of racial inequality, or neutral policies aimed at reducing it. Many of the administration’s actions rely on broad claims of illegality without providing specific violations.

The selective nature of enforcement is also telling.

Books about racism and civil rights were removed from military libraries, while books praising Nazi ideas or claiming racial intelligence differences were left untouched. The administration suspended admissions of refugees – over 90% of whom have been from Africa, Asia and Latin America in recent years – but then reopened the refugee program for white South Africans.

One year in, the pattern is hard to miss.

The administration is not simply applying neutral rules. It is dismantling the systems that once helped the U.S. move toward a more open and equal democracy. It is replacing them with policies that selectively narrow access to economic, cultural and educational participation.

The result is not simply a change in policy, but a fundamental shift in the trajectory of American democracy.

How Albert Einstein Found Faith at the Edge of Reason by Gerald Holton

 Though wary of organized religion, the physicist believed that the harmony of universal laws pointed to a higher power.

 Historians of modern science have good reason to be grateful to Paul Arthur Schilpp, professor of philosophy and Methodist clergyman, but better known as the editor of a series of volumes on “Living Philosophers,” which included several volumes on scientist-philosophers. His motto was: “The asking of questions about a philosopher’s meaning while he is alive.” And to his everlasting credit, he persuaded Albert Einstein to do what he had resisted all his years: to sit down to write, in 1946 at age 67, an extensive autobiography — 45 pages long in print.

 

To be sure, Einstein excluded most of what he called “the merely personal.” But on the very first page, he shared a memory that will guide us to the main conclusion of this essay. He wrote that when still very young, he had searched for an escape from the seemingly hopeless and demoralizing chase after one’s desires and strivings. That escape offered itself first in religion. Although brought up as the son of “entirely irreligious (Jewish) parents,” through the teaching in his Catholic primary school, mixed with his private instruction in elements of the Jewish religion, Einstein found within himself a “deep religiosity” — indeed, “the religious paradise of youth.”

The accuracy of this memorable experience is documented in other sources, including the biographical account of Einstein’s sister, Maja. There she makes a plausible extrapolation: that Einstein’s “religious feeling” found expression in later years in his deep interest and actions to ameliorate the difficulties to which fellow Jews were being subjected, actions ranging from his fights against anti-Semitism to his embrace of Zionism (in the hope, as he put it in one of his speeches [April 20, 1935], that it would include a “peaceable and friendly cooperation with the Arab people”). As we shall see, Maja’s extrapolation of the reach of her brother’s early religious feelings might well have gone much further.

The primacy of young Albert’s First Paradise came to an abrupt end. As he put it early in his “Autobiographical Notes,” through reading popular science books, he came to doubt the stories of the Bible. Thus, he passed first through what he colorfully described as a “positively fanatic indulgence in free thinking.”

But then he found new enchantments. First, at age 12, he read a little book on Euclidean plane geometry — he called it “holy,” a veritable “Wunder.” Then, still as a boy, he became entranced by the contemplation of that huge external, extra-personal world of science, which presented itself to him “like a great, eternal riddle.” To that study one could devote oneself, finding thereby “inner freedom and security.” He believed that choosing the “road to this Paradise,” although quite antithetical to the first one and less alluring, did prove itself trustworthy. Indeed, by age 16, he had his father declare him to the authorities as “without confession,” and for the rest of his life, he tried to dissociate himself from organized religious activities and associations, inventing his own form of religiousness, just as he was creating his own physics.

These two realms appeared to him eventually not as separate as numerous biographers would suggest. On the contrary, my task here is to demonstrate that at the heart of Einstein’s mature identity there developed a fusion of his First and his Second Paradise — into a Third Paradise, where the meaning of a life of brilliant scientific activity drew on the remnants of his fervent first feelings of youthful religiosity.

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For this purpose, we shall have to make what may seem like an excursus, but one that will, in the end, throw light on his overwhelming passion, throughout his scientific and personal life, to bring about the joining of these and other seemingly incommensurate aspects, whether in nature or society.

In 1918, he gave a glimpse of it in a speech (“Prinzipien der Forschung”) honoring the 60th birthday of his friend and colleague Max Planck, to whose rather metaphysical conception about the purpose of science Einstein had drifted while moving away from the quite opposite, positivistic one of an early intellectual mentor, Ernst Mach. As Einstein put it in that speech, the search for one “simplified and lucid image of the world” not only was the supreme task for a scientist, but also corresponded to a psychological need: to flee from personal, everyday life, with all its dreary disappointments, and escape into the world of objective perception and thought. Into the formation of such a world picture, the scientist could place the “center of gravity of his emotional life [Gefühlsleben].” And in a sentence with special significance, he added that persevering on the most difficult scientific problems requires “a state of feeling [Gefühlszustand] similar to that of a religious person or a lover.”

Throughout Einstein’s writings, one can watch him searching for that world picture, for a comprehensive Weltanschauung, one yielding a total conception that, as he put it, would include every empirical fact (Gesamtheit der Erfahrungstatsachen) — not only of physical science, but also of life.

He tried to dissociate himself from organized religious activities and associations, inventing his own form of religiousness.

Einstein was, of course, not alone in this pursuit. The German literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries contained a seemingly obsessive flood of books and essays on the oneness of the world picture. They included writings by both Ernst Mach and Max Planck, and, for good measure, a 1912 general manifesto appealing to scholars in all fields of knowledge to combine their efforts in order to “bring forth a comprehensive Weltanschauung.” The 34 signatories included Ernst Mach, Sigmund Freud, Ferdinand Tönnies, David Hilbert, Jacques Loeb — and the then still little-known Albert Einstein.

But while for most others this culturally profound longing for unity — already embedded in the philosophical and literary works they all had studied — was mostly the subject of an occasional opportunity for exhortation (nothing came of the manifesto), for Einstein it was different, a constant preoccupation responding to a persistent, deeply felt intellectual and psychological need.

This fact can be most simply illustrated in Einstein’s scientific writings. As a first example, I turn to one of my favorite manuscripts in his archive. It is a lengthy manuscript in his handwriting, of around 1920, titled, in translation, “Fundamental Ideas and Methods of Relativity.” It contains the passage in which Einstein revealed what, in his words, was “the happiest thought of my life [der gluecklichste Gedanke meines Lebens]” — a thought experiment that came to him in 1907: nothing less than the definition of the equivalence principle, later developed in his general relativity theory.

It occurred to Einstein — thinking first of all in visual terms, as was usual for him — that if a man were falling from the roof of his house and tried to let anything drop, it would only move alongside him, thus indicating the equivalence of acceleration and gravity. In Einstein’s words, “the acceleration of free fall with respect to the material is therefore a mighty argument that the postulate of relativity is to be extended to coordinate systems that move nonuniformly relative to one another . . . . ”

For the present purpose, I want to draw attention to another passage in that manuscript. His essay begins in a largely impersonal, pedagogic tone, similar to that of his first popular book on relativity, published in 1917. But in a surprising way, in the section titled “General Relativity Theory,” Einstein suddenly switches to a personal account. He reports that in the construction of the special theory, the “thought concerning the Faraday [experiment] on electromagnetic induction played for me a leading role.” He then describes that old experiment, in words similar to the first paragraph of his 1905 relativity paper, concentrating on the well-known fact, discovered by Faraday in 1831, that the induced current is the same whether it is the coil or the magnet that is in motion relative to the other, whereas the “theoretical interpretation of the phenomenon in these two cases is quite different.”

While other physicists, for many decades, had been quite satisfied with that difference, here Einstein reveals a central preoccupation at the depth of his soul: “The thought that one is dealing here with two fundamentally different cases was for me unbearable [war mir unertraeglich]. The difference between these two cases could not be a real difference . . . . The phenomenon of the electromagnetic induction forced me to postulate the (special) relativity principle.”

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Let us step back for a moment to contemplate that word “unbearable.” It is reinforced by a passage in Einstein’s “Autobiographical Notes”: “By and by I despaired [verzweifelte ich] of discovering the true laws by means of constructive efforts based on known facts. The longer and the more despairingly I tried, the more I came to the conviction that only the discovery of a universal formal principle could lead us to assured results.” He might have added that the same postulational method had already been pioneered in their main works by two of his heroes, Euclid and Newton.

Other physicists — for example, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg — also reported that at times they were brought to despair in their research. Still other scientists were evidently even brought to suicide by such disappointment. For researchers fiercely engaged at the very frontier, the psychological stakes can be enormous. Einstein resolved his discomfort by, as he did in his 1905 relativity paper, turning to the postulation of two fundamental principles (the principle of relativity in physics and the constancy of the velocity of light in vacuo), adopting them as tools of thought.

Einstein also had a second method to bridge the unbearable differences in a theory: generalizing it, so that the apparently differently grounded phenomena are revealed to be coming from the same base. We know from a letter to Max von Laue of January 17, 1952, found in the archive, that Einstein’s early concern with the physics of fluctuation phenomena was the common root of his three great papers of 1905, on such different topics as the quantum property of light, Brownian movement, and relativity.

For researchers fiercely engaged at the very frontier, the psychological stakes can be enormous.

But even earlier, in a letter of April 14, 1901, to his school friend Marcel Grossmann, Einstein had revealed his generalizing approach to physics while working on his very first published paper, on capillarity. There, he tried to bring together in one theory the opposing behaviors of bodies: moving upward when a liquid is in a capillary tube, but downward when the liquid is released freely.

In that letter, he spelled out his interpenetrating emotional and scientific needs in one sentence: “It is a wonderful feeling [ein herrliches Gefühl] to recognize the unity of a complex of appearances which, to direct sense experiences, appear to be quite separate things.” The postulation of universal formal principles, and the discovery among phenomena of a unity, of Einheitlichkeit, through the generalization of the basic theory — those were two of Einstein’s favorite weapons, as his letters and manuscripts show. Writing to Willem de Sitter on November 4, 1916, he confessed: “I am driven by my need to generalize [mein Verallgemeinerungsbeduerfnis].” That need, that compulsion, was also deeply entrenched in German culture and resonated with, and supported, Einstein’s approach.

Let me just note in passing that while still a student at the Polytechnic Institute in Zurich, in order to get his certificate to be a high school science teacher, Einstein took optional courses on Immanuel Kant and Goethe, whose central works he had studied since his teenage years. That Verallgemeinerungsbeduerfnis was clearly a driving force behind Einstein’s career trajectory.

Thus, he generalized from old experimental results, like Faraday’s, to arrive at special relativity, in which he unified space and time, electric and magnetic forces, energy and mass, and so resolved the whole long dispute among scientists between adherence to a mechanistic versus an electromagnetic world picture. Then he generalized the special theory to produce what he first significantly called, in an article of 1913, not the general but the generalized relativity theory. Paul Ehrenfest wrote him in puzzlement: “How far will this Verallgemeinerung go on?”

And, finally, Einstein threw himself into the attempt of a grand unification of quantum physics and of gravity: a unified field theory. It is an example of an intense and perhaps unique, life-long, tenacious dedication, despite Einstein’s failure at the very end — which nevertheless, as a program, set the stage for the ambition of some of today’s best scientists, who have taken over that search for the Holy Grail of physics — a theory of everything.

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So much for trying to get a glimpse of the mind of Einstein as a scientist. But at this point, for anyone who has studied this man’s work and life in detail, a new thought urges itself forward. As in his science, Einstein also lived under the compulsion to unify — in his politics, in his social ideals, even in his everyday behavior. He abhorred all nationalisms, and called himself, even while in Berlin during World War I, a European.

Later, he supported the One World movement, dreamed of a unified supernational form of government, helped to initiate the international Pugwash movement of scientists during the Cold War, and was as ready to befriend visiting high school students as the Queen of the Belgians. His instinctive penchant for democracy and dislike of hierarchy and class differences must have cost him greatly in the early days, as when he addressed his chief professor at the Swiss Polytechnic Institute, on whose recommendation his entrance to any academic career would depend, not by any title, but simply as “Herr Weber.”

And at the other end of the spectrum, in his essay on ethics, Einstein cited Moses, Jesus, and Buddha as equally valid prophets. No boundaries, no barriers; none in life, as there are none in nature. Einstein’s life and his work were so mutually resonant that we recognize both to have been carried on together in the service of one grand project — the fusion into one coherency.

There were also no boundaries or barriers between Einstein’s scientific and religious feelings. After having passed from the youthful first, religious paradise into his second, immensely productive scientific one, he found in his middle years a fusion of those two motivations — his Third Paradise. We had a hint of this development in his remark in 1918, in which he observed the parallel states of feeling of the scientist and of the “religious person.” Other hints come from the countless, well-known quotations in which Einstein referred to God — doing it so often that Niels Bohr had to chide him. Karl Popper remarked that in conversations with Einstein, “I learned nothing . . . . he tended to express things in theological terms, and this was often the only way to argue with him. I found it finally quite uninteresting.”

There were no boundaries or barriers between Einstein’s scientific and religious feelings.

But two other reports may point to the more profound layer of Einstein’s deepest convictions. One is his remark to one of his assistants, Ernst Straus: “What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world.” The second is Einstein’s reply to a curious telegram. In 1929, Boston’s Cardinal O’Connell branded Einstein’s theory of relativity as “befogged speculation producing universal doubt about God and His Creation,” and as implying “the ghastly apparition of atheism.” In alarm, New York’s Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein asked Einstein by telegram: “Do you believe in God? Stop. Answer paid 50 words.”

In his response, for which Einstein needed but 25 (German) words, he stated his beliefs succinctly: “I believe in Spinoza’s God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.” The rabbi cited this as evidence that Einstein was not an atheist, and further declared that “Einstein’s theory, if carried to its logical conclusion, would bring to mankind a scientific formula for monotheism.” Einstein wisely remained silent on that point.

The good rabbi might have had in mind the writings of the Religion of Science movement, which had flourished in Germany under the distinguished auspices of Ernst Haeckel, Wilhelm Ostwald, and their circle (the Monistenbund), and also in America, chiefly in Paul Carus’s books and journals, such as “The Open Court,” which carried the words “Devoted to the Religion of Science” on its masthead.

If Einstein had read Carus’s book, “The Religion of Science” (1893), he may have agreed with one sentence in it: “Scientific truth is not profane, it is sacred.” Indeed, the charismatic view of science in the lives of some scientists has been the subject of much scholarly study — for example, in Joseph Ben-David’s “Scientific Growth” (1991), and earlier in Robert K. Merton’s magisterial book of 1938, “Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England.”

In the section entitled “The Integration of Religion and Science,” Merton notes that among the scientists he studied, “the religious ethic, considered as a social force, so consecrated science as to make it a highly respected and laudable focus of attention.” The social scientist Bernard H. Gustin elaborated on this perception, writing that science at the highest level is charismatic because scientists devoted to such tasks are “thought to come into contact with what is essential in the universe.” I believe this is precisely why so many who knew little about Einstein’s scientific writing flocked to catch a glimpse of him and to this day feel somehow uplifted by contemplating his iconic image.

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Starting in the late 1920s, Einstein became more and more serious about clarifying the relationship between his transcendental and his scientific impulses. He wrote several essays on religiosity; five of them, composed between 1930 and the early 1950s, are reproduced in his book “Ideas and Opinions.”

In those chapters, we can watch the result of a struggle that had its origins in his school years, as he developed, or rather invented, a religion that offered a union with science. In the evolution of religion, he remarked, there were three developmental stages. At the first, “with primitive man it is above all fear that evokes religious notions. This ‘religion of fear’. . . is in an important degree stabilized by the formation of a special priestly caste” that colludes with secular authority to take advantage of it for its own interest. The next step — “admirably illustrated in the Jewish scriptures” — was a moral religion embodying the ethical imperative, “a development [that] continued in the New Testament.”

Yet it had a fatal flaw: “the anthropomorphic character of the concept of God,” easy to grasp by “underdeveloped minds” of the masses, while freeing them of responsibility. This flaw disappears at Einstein’s third, mature stage of religion, to which he believed mankind is now reaching and which the great spirits (he names Democritus, St. Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza) had already attained — namely, the “cosmic religious feeling” that sheds all anthropomorphic elements.

In describing the driving motivation toward that final, highest stage, Einstein uses the same ideas, even some of the same phrases, with which he had celebrated first his religious and then his scientific paradise: “The individual feels the futility of human desires, and aims at the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought.” “Individual existence impresses him as a sort of prison, and he wants to experience the universe as a single, significant whole.” Of course! Here, as always, there has to be the intoxicating experience of unification.

And so Einstein goes on, “I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research . . . . A contemporary has said not unjustly that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people.” In another of his essays on religion, Einstein points to a plausible source for his specific formulations: “Those individuals to whom we owe the great creative achievements of science were all of them imbued with a truly religious conviction that this universe of ours is something perfect, and susceptible through the rational striving for knowledge. If this conviction had not been a strongly emotional one, and if those searching for knowledge had not been inspired by Spinoza’s amor dei intellectualis, they would hardly have been capable of that untiring devotion which alone enables man to attain his greatest achievements.”

“I believe in Spinoza’s God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world.”

I believe we can guess at the first time Einstein read Baruch Spinoza’s “Ethics” (Ethica Ordinae Geometrico Demonstrata), a system constructed on the Euclidean model of deductions from propositions. Soon after getting his first real job at the patent office, Einstein joined with two friends to form a discussion circle, meeting once or twice a week in what they called, with gallows humor, the Akademie Olympia. We know the list of books they read and discussed. High among them, reportedly at Einstein’s suggestion, was Spinoza’s “Ethics,” which he read afterwards several times more. Even when his sister Maja joined him in Princeton in later life and was confined to bed by an illness, he thought that reading a good book to her would help, and chose Spinoza’s “Ethics” for that purpose.

By that time, Spinoza’s work and life had long been important to Einstein. He had written an introduction to a biography of Spinoza (by his son-in-law, Rudolf Kayser, 1946); he had contributed to the “Spinoza Dictionary” (1951); he had referred to Spinoza in many of his letters; and he had even composed a poem in Spinoza’s honor. He admired Spinoza for his independence of mind, his deterministic philosophical outlook, his skepticism about organized religion and orthodoxy — which had resulted in his excommunication from his synagogue in 1656 — and even for his ascetic preference, which compelled him to remain in poverty and solitude to live in a sort of spiritual ecstasy, instead of accepting a professorship at the University of Heidelberg.

Originally neglected, Spinoza’s “Ethics,” published only posthumously, profoundly influenced other thinkers, such as Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Goethe (who called him “our common saint”), Albert Schweitzer, and Romain Rolland (who, on reading Ethics, confessed, “I deciphered not what he said, but what he meant to say”).

For Spinoza, God and nature were one (deus sive natura). True religion was based not on dogma but on a feeling for the rationality and the unity underlying all finite and temporal things, on a feeling of wonder and awe that generates the idea of God, but a God which lacks any anthropomorphic conception. As Spinoza wrote in Proposition 15 in “Ethics,” he opposed assigning to God “body and soul and being subject to passions.” Hence, “God is incorporeal” — as had been said by others, from Maimonides on, to whom God was knowable indirectly through His creation, through nature.

In other pages of “Ethics,” Einstein could read Spinoza’s opposition to the idea of cosmic purpose, and that he favored the primacy of the law of cause and effect — an all-pervasive determinism that governs nature and life — rather than “playing at dice,” in Einstein’s famous remark. And as if he were merely paraphrasing Spinoza, Einstein wrote in 1929 that the perception in the universe of “profound reason and beauty constitute true religiosity; in this sense, and in this sense alone, I am a deeply religious man.”

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Much has been written about the response of Einstein’s contemporaries to his Spinozistic cosmic religion. For example, the physicist Arnold Sommerfeld recorded in Schilpp’s volume that he often felt “that Einstein stands in a particularly intimate relation to the God of Spinoza.”

But what finally most interests us here is to what degree Einstein, having reached his Third Paradise, in which his yearnings for science and religion are joined, may even have found in his own research in physics fruitful ideas emerging from that union. In fact, there are at least some tantalizing parallels between passages in Spinoza’s “Ethics” and Einstein’s publications in cosmology — parallels that the physicist and philosopher Max Jammer, in his book “Einstein and Religion” (1999), considers as amounting to intimate connections. For example, in Part I of Ethics (“Concerning God”), Proposition 29 begins: “In nature there is nothing contingent, but all things are determined from the necessity of the divine nature to exist and act in a certain manner.”

Here is at least a discernible overlap with Einstein’s tenacious devotion to determinism and strict causality at the fundamental level, despite all the proofs from quantum mechanics of the reign of probabilism, at least in the subatomic realm. There are other such parallels throughout.

But what is considered by some as the most telling relationship between Spinoza’s Propositions and Einstein’s physics comes from passages such as Corollary 2 of Proposition 20: “It follows that God is immutable or, which is the same thing, all His attributes are immutable.” In a letter of September 3, 1915, to Else (his cousin and later his wife), Einstein, having read Spinoza’s “Ethics” again, wrote, “I think the ‘Ethics’ will have a permanent effect on me.” Two years later, when he expanded his general relativity to include “cosmological considerations,” Einstein found to his dismay that his system of equations did “not allow the hypothesis of a spatially closed-ness of the world [raeumliche Geschlossenheit].”

How did Einstein cure this flaw? By something he had done very rarely: making an ad hoc addition, purely for convenience: “We can add, on the left side of the field equation a — for the time being — unknown universal constant, – λ.”

“The cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research.”

In fact, it seems that not much harm is done thereby. It does not change the covariance; it still corresponds with the observation of motions in the solar system (“as long as λ is small”), and so forth. Moreover, the proposed new universal constant λ also determines the average density of the universe with which it can remain in equilibrium, and provides the radius and volume of a presumed spherical universe. Altogether a beautiful, immutable universe — one an immutable God could be identified with.

But in 1922, Alexander Friedmann showed that the equations of general relativity did allow expansion or contraction. And in 1929, Edwin Hubble found by astronomical observations the fact that the universe does expand. Thus, Einstein — at least according to the physicist George Gamow — remarked that “inserting λ was the biggest blunder of my life.”

Max Jammer and the physicist John Wheeler, both of whom knew Einstein, traced his unusual ad hoc insertion of λ , nailing down that “spatially closed-ness of the world,” to a relationship between Einstein’s thoughts and Spinoza’s Propositions. They also pointed to another possible reason for it: In Spinoza’s writings, one finds the concept that God would not have made an empty world. But in an expanding universe, in the infinity of time, the density of matter would be diluted to zero in the limit. Space itself would disappear, since, as Einstein put it in 1952, “On the basis of the general theory of relativity . . . space as opposed to ‘what fills space’. . . had no separate existence.”

Even if all of these suggestive indications of an intellectual, emotional, and perhaps even spiritual resonance between Einstein’s and Spinoza’s writings were left entirely aside, there still remains Einstein’s attachment to his “cosmic religion.” That was the end point of his own troublesome pilgrimage in religiosity — from his early vision of his First Paradise, through his disillusionments, to his dedication to find fundamental unity within natural science, and at last to his recognition of science as the devotion, in his words, of “a deeply religious unbeliever” — his final embrace of seeming incommensurables in his Third Paradise.

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After the strike: The danger of war in Iran

 On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched a joint military operation against Iran, resulting in the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Brookings experts break down what the ensuing war means for Iran and what’s at stake internationally and domestically.

 Suzanne Maloney

‘Khamenei raft’

In February 1979, after months of internal unrest, Iranian newspapers announced the departure of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last king of Iran. The massive banner headline declaring “Shah raft” (“the Shah is gone”) quickly became iconic. That concise phrase and the vivid image evoked the magnitude of this historical moment, at the culmination of an unlikely popular revolution that toppled the modernizing monarch of a wealthy, pro-Western state in a strategically and economically vital region.

Saturday’s death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of the state that succeeded the monarchy, in an Israeli airstrike on his compound, is no less momentous. Over the course of nearly 37 years in power, Khamenei cemented the unique dominance of his office, thwarted every effort to make meaningful changes to Iran’s approach to the world, and empowered and expanded its influence across the region. For many Iranians and others, Khamenei’s quick elimination elicited celebrations and a rare sense of hope for the future.

Sadly, however, that hope may be short-lived. Just as the shah’s departure failed to usher in the aspirations of the millions who rallied in the streets during the 1979 revolution, it’s highly uncertain that the U.S.-Israeli operation will successfully produce a real transition to a different regime. Over the past few days, airstrikes have powerfully degraded Iran’s military capabilities and decapitated key political and military leadership. Still, the deeply embedded networks and institutions that have underpinned the Islamic Republic for nearly half a century ensure that, at least in the near term, the vestiges of the power structure continue to hold an overwhelming advantage over any challengers.

To regain some leverage even as the country remains under bombardment, Tehran is deploying its time-tested strategy of escalating strikes on its neighbors’ energy and economic infrastructure in the hopes of creating pressure and incentives for diplomacy. After the attrition of its proxies and its nuclear program at the hands of Israel and the United States over the past 18 months, and then the shock of a massive internal uprising in January, the regime saw this conflict coming. For Iran’s battered and bloodied regime, the stakes are existential. Imposing high costs on Washington, their neighbors, and the global economy is their survival strategy.

 Mara Karlin

High-end war, low-cost drones

The horrific October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks triggered a series of conflicts across the Middle East, culminating this weekend in sweeping American and Israeli efforts to conduct regime change in Iran. Together, the U.S. and Israeli militaries have apparently hit more than a thousand Iranian targets in two days, demonstrating a historic joint operation against high value political and military people and places, and employing sophisticated conventional capabilities paired with rich intelligence and strategic planning.  

In response, the Islamic Republic has operated like there is no tomorrow—which is plausible given the breadth, depth, and efficacy of these attacks on its foundations. In doing so, Iranian missiles and drones have attacked at least nine different countries as of Monday morning, including Gulf bases where the U.S. military operates, likely executed by devolved command and control. Iranian efforts to expand the war have resulted in a number of countries who hoped to avoid engagement in this conflict now being brought into the conflict. While many Iranian missiles have been shot down, relatively low cost Iranian drones appear to have been more effective in evading air defense and hitting targets; further evidence that contemporary wars span the low to high end of the continuum of conflict. This latest chapter in Middle East wars looks like “everything everywhere, all at once.” 

 Vanda Felbab-Brown

The limits of leadership targeting

In the United States and Israel’s war against Iran, the Trump administration announced as a key goal the end of the theocratic regime that has ruled Iran since 1979. But it’s provided few—and contradictory—details as to what the regime’s end means, and the new political dispensation it would find satisfactory. It merely called on the Iranian people to overthrow the regime, without repeating its earlier promises of protection.

In the first days of airstrikes, the United States and Israel killed the ayatollah as well as several top leaders of the Iranian military and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), adding to those killed in July 2025 during the joint attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities. But the Iranian regime is vast, with sprawling religious authority, layers of officers across various armed branches and militias, and widespread control of the country’s economic assets. Even if the United States and Israel continue mowing down newly-replaced leaders for weeks, the IRGC and various armed forces and their economic assets will not just melt away, even if they eventually fracture.

Even a future electoral process, should a transitional regime at some point emerge, may not lead to a sustained democratic system. Although many people in Iran crave it, such outcomes require nurturing over many years, including from the external intervener. Iran’s fragmented political opposition may produce unstable governments that struggle to satisfy the immense economic needs of the Iranian people and a clamoring for a strongman. And that’s even if armed struggles and militancy don’t rise, such as from Iran’s oppressed Kurdish and Baluch people or from Islamist groups.

The Trump administration broke a cruel, brutal, and dangerous regime with little clarity, planning, readiness, and accountability for how to foster a new, desirable replacement system. In Venezuela, it remains satisfied with 99% of the Maduro regime staying in power, including those with egregious human rights records, and only cosmetic political liberalization, as long as the “new” regime appears to be doing U.S. oil bidding. President Donald Trump is hinting that such a minimal change of leadership in Iran may be enough for him. It hardly will be for the Iranian people or Israel.

 Stephanie T. Williams

Flying blind

We are flying blind, captured by magical thinking. The United States has launched an entirely volitional and illegal war against a country in which it has had no diplomatic presence for nearly 50 years. Against a theocratic dictatorship whose leader the U.S. military has now decapitated, and who will be mourned by few, but who may well be replaced by someone far worse. A country of 92 million people ruthlessly ruled for decades by a corrupt cabal of armed thugs, whose tentacles deeply penetrated what little remained of the state’s institutions.

The Trump administration has no clue and no plan for what comes next. We can, however, draw lessons—none of them good—from the United States’ 21st^–century failures in regime change wars in the Middle East and North Africa. The United States must therefore prepare for the likelihood of Iran’s full implosion, fragmentation, and the spread of a chaos that would make the aftermath of our misadventures in Iraq and Libya look like a picnic. Is the Trump administration prepared to stand by while the Middle East region is engulfed in violence? Will it dispatch ground troops? Will it maintain an armada in the Persian Gulf? None of this has been explained to the American people or U.S. congressional representatives. Ironically, the greatest beneficiaries of the United States’ grave violations of international law are the very actors whom, under normal circumstances, Washington would be seeking to restrain: Moscow will be emboldened to continue its barbaric assault on Ukraine, while China will feel empowered to move on Taiwan.

 Sharan Grewal

The most likely scenario is still a deal, not regime change

For Trump, the best option in Iran is still a “Venezuela scenario”: striking a deal with whoever comes to replace Khamenei, likely a modified nuclear deal plus some oil concessions. Trump—and especially his MAGA base—has no interest in a long, drawn-out war in the Middle East, which is what is required to truly topple the Iranian regime. Especially as casualties mount—with three U.S. troops already killed over the weekend, followed by a friendly fire downing of three jets Monday morning—Trump is likely to abandon his earlier calls for regime change and attempt to strike a deal. Iran, for its part, appears to be pursuing the same strategy, expanding the war as much as and as quickly as possible in order to create the greatest diplomatic pressure on Trump to end the war, and signaling its interest in negotiations as well.

Inside Iran, while the killing of Khamenei and other top officials has decapitated the regime, the incentives of each element of the regime have not meaningfully shifted. While protesters celebrated Khamenei’s death in the streets, the regime also organized continued nationalist counterprotests in its favor. That suggests the regime’s networks remain resilient, and, at least as of writing, there have still been no major defections.

If so, then for Iran, all Trump’s attacks have really done is to accelerate Khamenei’s already looming death. But the operation may have a meaningful impact on Trump himself: Nicolás Maduro’s capture and now Khamenei’s killing might further embolden him to continue to pursue these reckless, unilateral military operations against heads of state across the globe. Despite his campaign rhetoric, Trump has proven to be even more hawkish than his predecessors, leaving future generations to face the eventual blowback.

 Steven Heydemann

The regime change gamble

Wars rarely go according to plan. In launching a war of choice with Iran, the United States and Israel have unleashed a confrontation that is unlikely to succeed and certain to produce unintended effects that they will be unable to manage or contain. There is little question that the United States and Israel can inflict serious damage on Iran’s military capabilities. It is likely that Iran, already severely weakened, will be unable to mount a sustained response to blistering attacks by the United States and Israel, though it will certainly try to inflict as much damage as it can on United States and Israeli targets across the region.

Whether the United States will succeed in its longer-term objectives, however, is doubtful. The Trump administration’s minimal aims can be seen as reversing the unintended effects of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the event that paved the way for the expansion of Iran’s influence across the Arab east and reinforced its commitment to its nuclear program. These include giving up its nuclear ambitions; accepting limits on its missile program; abandoning its proxies in Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen; and conceding its status as a regional power. The Trump administration’s maximalist aims can be seen as reversing the effects of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, restoring Iran’s standing as a status quo power aligned with the West. Neither outcome is possible if the current regime remains in power, and appeals by both Trump and Netanyahu encouraging Iranians to rise up underscore the centrality of regime change to the success of their plans.

Yet regime change is also the war’s central vulnerability and holds out the most dangerous of its potential unintended consequences. Several scenarios are possible, none of which offer any assurance that the war will go according to plan. First, the regime may well survive the war even if its current leadership has been killed off, paving the way for a period of increased repression, renewed determination to restore its deterrent capabilities, and increased use of asymmetric means to impose costs on its enemies. After all, Hamas and Hezbollah have survived far more devastating assaults. Iran’s regime will likely prove to be no less resilient. Second, the regime might collapse yet be replaced by leaders even more repressive and even less inclined to make the concessions demanded by the United States and Israel. Or, third, regime collapse could inaugurate a period of sustained conflict and political instability that will be difficult to contain within Iran’s borders. In going to war to exploit the Iranian regime’s weakness, therefore, Trump and Netanyahu may well have set the stage for a lose-lose outcome that will leave no one, least of all the Iranian people, better off.

 Dafna H. Rand

Civilian tools, not bombs

Trump’s war of choice is unwise and potentially unlawful. It also misaligns ends and means, like so many of Trump’s other defense and foreign policies. If this war’s objective is to transform the Iranian regime’s nature—rather than merely its leadership—the prioritization and expansion of U.S. civilian tools of influence should be paramount. For decades, the United States and its allies have supported quiet, locally led efforts within Iran to strengthen civil society—journalists, academics, trade unions, environmental advocates, and women’s rights organizations. Congress has consistently funded these activities through the Near East Regional Democracy Program, which, since its establishment in 2009, has invested nearly $600 million in on-the-ground initiatives.

Administrations of both parties have approached this work with appropriate caution, given the recognition that only the Iranian people can legitimately mobilize internal pressure for political change. U.S. involvement in Iran’s domestic politics also carries historical baggage. When major protests emerged—the Green Movement (2009-2010), the Dey protests (2017-2018), and the Women, Life, Freedom movement (2021-2022)—the United States calibrated its endorsement out of concern that its involvement would discredit these local efforts. In retrospect, this caution may have been excessive, and the United States should have provided more public support.

Even so, during the peak of the Women, Life, Freedom protests, roughly one in four Iranians used a U.S.-funded virtual private network (VPN) to bypass heavy government censorship. In the years since, U.S. programs—often involving partnerships with U.S. technology companies—have developed more advanced methods that allow Iranians to circumvent total internet shutdowns—rare events that require technologies more sophisticated than VPNs or even satellite-based systems, such as Starlink.

Over the past five years, U.S. policymakers added new accountability measures and used Global Magnitsky sanctions to target Iranian officials responsible for human rights abuses and corruption.

The United States should now expand every civilian lever of statecraft. Policymakers should restore the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor and associated foreign assistance programs, including internet freedom funding. For more than a decade, these capabilities allowed the United States to anticipate and counter authoritarian crackdowns in the information space. They should also rebuild the specialized teams that administer Global Magnitsky and related sanctions so they can hold individual perpetrators of repression and state violence accountable. Most urgently, the administration should set aside its counterproductive tensions with the European Union, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and other multilateral institutions. Without a U.S. presence on the ground in Iran, Washington will need to rely on its partners to help support opposition actors.

 Aslı Aydıntaşbaş

After Iran, Turkey and Israel face a reckoning

With the death of Iran’s supreme leader and the continued U.S.-Israeli strikes on the Iranian regime, the Islamic Republic’s future is suddenly much harder to predict. The regime may decline gradually, and then suddenly. Or a narrower security elite may consolidate power, eventually strike a deal with Washington, and preserve the system through harsher repression at home.

One consequence, however, is already coming into view: this war is sharpening the enmity between Turkey and Israel, pushing them closer to a long-term collision.

That much was clear in Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s initial response. He blamed Netanyahu for triggering the conflict and condemned Israel’s strikes as “provocations,” with no reference to the U.S. military role. Ankara wants to believe Trump was dragged into war by an Israel determined to reshape the Middle East.

Turkey doesn’t want another war at its doorstep and will quietly work with the Trump administration and regime insiders to identify an off-ramp—not out of sympathy for Tehran but because it fears the day after. Iran and Turkey are historic rivals, and Turks have long been nervous about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, missile capabilities, and proxy networks. But Turkish officials also feared that war would bring prolonged instability and produce consequences worse than the status quo—including refugee flows, trade and energy disruption, and the possibility that turmoil inside Iran could create new space for Kurdistan Workers’ Party-linked Kurdish autonomy inside Iran. Turkey does not believe regime change is in the cards.

Ankara’s deeper concern, however, is geopolitical. It prefers the Iran it knows to a postwar order shaped more decisively by Israel. In Turkish eyes, American and Israeli aims diverge. Trump is seen as a transactional actor who may still declare a quick victory and return to nuclear diplomacy. Israel, by contrast, is viewed by Turks as pursuing something broader: an ideological transformation, a fractured Iran, and a Middle East reorganized around Israeli military primacy. That will inevitably clash with Turkey’s own interests and quest for regional influence.

That is why Turkey and Israel are increasingly locked into a security dilemma, each viewing the other’s gains as a direct threat—accusing each other of “neo-Ottomanism” and “Greater Israel” ambitions, respectively. Their rivalry had already intensified over Gaza and Syria. Now, the prospect of an Israel-led regional order will deepen it further. Ankara may stay out of the war itself. But managing the rivalry with Israel—and the diplomacy with Washington over what comes next—will be far harder.

 Kemal Kirişci

Turkey is holding its breath

Turkish leaders repeatedly expressed their categorical opposition to a military intervention against Iran. Two concerns would have been at the forefront of their minds: the potential for a mass influx of refugees and the economic consequences.

After the current Iranian regime rose to power in 1979, an estimated 1.5 million Iranians transited Turkey during the 1980s and early 1990s on their way to a then-welcoming Western Europe and the United States.  Today, traditional countries of asylum have closed their doors. A case in point is the Syrian refugees, who were overwhelmingly hosted in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan. In Turkey, the government initially received them with open arms, expecting a quick regime change in Syria and a quick return home. This did not happen. Instead, for more than a decade, until a slow repatriation process started with the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria late 2024, Turkey housed the largest refugee population in the world. Their presence—still numbering more than 2.3 million—has taxing social, political, and economic consequences in Turkey. This experience has unsurprisingly led the government to build a wall along both the Syrian and Iranian borders and consider receiving refugees on the Iranian side of the border.

The Turkish economy today is not booming, in contrast to when Syrians began to arrive in the spring of 2011. The government is following a painful anti-inflationary policy with limited results, a policy dependent on a highly overvalued and fragile national currency. A hike in energy prices and a slowdown in the world economy would aggravate Turkey’s so far manageable trade deficit. This could jeopardize the government’s economic policies and weaken its capacity to resist the opposition’s persistent calls for early national elections.  

 Constanze Stelzenmüller

Will Europe enter the fray?

The Iranian regime has played a nefarious role in European security for a long time: it has supported terrorist networks, fed wars and civil strife in the Middle East that swept streams of refugees to Europe, and helped Russia pursue its brutal invasion of Ukraine with Shahed drones. For Tehran, Europe was an enemy as much as Israel and the United States.

But the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran present European governments with a highly uncomfortable dilemma. Relief at the overthrow of a dictatorial regime that butchered its own citizens and exported terror is mixed with apprehension at the potential destabilizing consequences, including in Europe—and a sharp sense of limited agency and options. Most European governments initially responded to the aerial bombings with calls for restraint or the respect of civilian lives and international law.

Yet, following Iranian drone hits on British and French military bases, as well as bases in Jordan and Iraq that station German soldiers, the “E-3” (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom) declared on Sunday night: “We will take steps to defend our interests and those of our allies in the region, potentially through enabling necessary and proportionate defensive action to destroy Iran’s capability to fire missiles and drones at their source. We have agreed to work together with the US and allies in the region on this matter.” The U.K. has agreed to let the United States use British bases; France says it will boost its military presence in the region. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who arrives in Washington on Monday, will no doubt be asked what his repeated vow to build “the strongest army in Europe” means in this context.

Meanwhile, Europeans and Americans might do well to remember that there is one country with four years of expertise in downing Iranian drones: Ukraine.

 

Pavel K. Baev

For Russia, a major geopolitical setback with a sharp personal twist

The high probability of a U.S. attack on Iran was obvious in Moscow, but it still came as a shock. Russia sought to discourage this escalation by staging naval exercises with Iran, both on its own and together with China, but Trump’s “beautiful armada“ was too expensive to assemble to be deterred. From the narrow focus of the U.S.-Iranian talks in Geneva, Russian experts deduced a limited scope of air assault targeting primarily nuclear assets. They did not expect the first strike to be so massive, let alone effectively eliminate Iran’s top leadership.

During the previous escalation of hostilities in June 2025, President Vladimir Putin firmly refused to discuss the possibility of Israel or the United States targeting Iran’s supreme leader. Last Saturday, he held an emergency meeting of the Security Council, but not a word on the proceedings was published. His message of condolences decried Khamenei’s “assassination” as a “cynical violation of all norms of human morality and international law,” which rings hollow for any researcher of the Russian way of war, but betrays his angst. Putin has been obsessed with personal safety since the death of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, and Putin’s long self-isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic turned it into paranoia. How this fear would play in the U.S.-Russian-Ukrainian talks on a peace deal, no rational analysis can tell, but it is not impossible that Putin may discover new incentives for a compromise.