Grand Strategy by Narges Bajoghli and Vali Nasr

 

How a Remade Islamic Republic Will Reshape the Middle East

 

At the outset of the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran in February 2026, the Islamic Republic appeared battered and weakened. Large-scale bombing had destroyed industry and infrastructure, and a U.S. naval blockade had devastated an already ailing economy. In early March, U.S. President Donald Trump told reporters on Air Force One, “We’ve decimated their whole evil empire.” Several weeks later, he declared “total and complete victory.”

Three months in, however, the picture looks quite different. Iran retains its military and industrial capacity, and despite Trump’s call for Iranians to topple the regime, no popular uprising is in the offing. The war’s initial aim—to deliver a death blow to the Islamic Republic—has proved unattainable.

Rather than breaking Iran, the crucible of war has transformed it in unanticipated ways. To survive and establish new strategic advantages, the Islamic Republic had to adapt and innovate, changing how it waged war, ran the state, and managed society. And it had to do so with unprecedented speed. Tehran is now confident in what it has achieved and determined to consolidate those gains at home and abroad. The war has given rise to a new Iran, one that will reshape the Middle East and influence the course of geopolitics for years to come.

 A QUIET SUCCESSION

Sensing that the Iranian regime was weakened by Israel’s 12-day war in June 2025 and a popular uprising in January 2026, Israel and the United States launched airstrikes on Iran on February 28. They expected a quick victory through targeted assassinations of Iran’s leadership. But decapitation did not produce regime collapse. Instead, it opened the door for a new generation to take over.

 

Many Western observers view the new leadership that emerged during the war, which is dominated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as more ideologically hard-line and hawkish toward the United States and Israel. But that’s not quite right. What truly distinguishes it is subtler and more consequential. Observers outside Iran focus on the handful of top leaders such as Mojtaba Khamenei, the new supreme leader; Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of parliament; and Ahmad Vahidi, the commander of the IRGC. More important, however, is the transformation in the ranks below them: a new generation of IRGC commanders and civilian security officials who came of age after the 1979 revolution. They now hold key decision-making positions, and their nationalistic outlook on statecraft and security is redefining the Islamic Republic.

The worldviews of the founding generation of the revolution, including former leaders Ruhollah Khomeini and Ali Khamenei, were forged by their long opposition to the U.S.-backed rule of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi and years spent in the shah’s prisons or in exile. Those at the helm today, Iran’s second generation of revolutionaries, including Mojtaba Khamenei, Ghalibaf, and Vahidi, were teenagers and young adults during the Iran-Iraq War. Their worldview was hardened in the trenches of the longest conventional war of the twentieth century. Those in the new managerial class of Iran’s political and armed forces, the third generation of the revolution, know nothing but postrevolutionary Iran. The members of this officer class of the armed forces and the IRGC, along with their affiliated security institutions, adopted a structured, technocratic culture and a strategic outlook built around national defense, not revolutionary ideology. And they govern with the confidence of leaders who believe they have successfully defended Iran in two wars against militarily superior powers (last year’s 12-day war and this year’s far larger conflict), achieving something the revolution had only promised: a genuine weakening of American power in the Middle East.

The previous supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed on the first day of the February war, was the product of the intellectual and political currents of pre-​revolutionary Iran in the Pahlavi era. His political education had been honed by debate with secular nationalists, leftists, and liberals who shared his goals of toppling the monarchy and standing up to Western imperialism. Once in power, the revolution’s leaders imposed their ideology on Iran, but they never overcame the insecurity inherent in asserting the right to rule over a society that would not wholly submit.

 

The new generation knows none of this firsthand. Most of them were children at the founding of the Islamic Republic and were raised believing in its right to rule. These men did not fight their way to power; they came of age inside the institutions of power, taking their legitimacy as given. The insecurity that marked the founding generation—the constant need to prove that the revolution was real, its claims serious, the old elite truly defeated—is largely absent. They are not defending a revolution. They are administering a state.

This psychological distinction has enormous practical implications. When Ali Khamenei’s generation confronted the world—in hostage negotiations, nuclear talks, regional confrontations—there was always an undercurrent of grievance, a voice rising in the rhetoric of historical injustice and Islamic vindication. It was powerful and real, but a strategic liability. It made them predictable, defensive, and prone to conflating the defense of their ideology with the defense of Iran’s national interests, which did not always neatly align.

The new generation has separated revolution from statecraft. At home and abroad, it neither espouses revolutionary grandiosity nor advocates revolutionary activism. The new leaders are establishment actors: pragmatic, hardened nationalists operating with a clear-eyed assessment of Iran’s capabilities and vulnerabilities. Unlike their predecessors, they can exercise strategic patience and act decisively. They look at Iran’s weaknesses frequently and publicly—something the founding generation was too insecure to do honestly—and they treat them as problems to be solved. That instinct drove the changes Tehran made between the two wars.

 

BATTLE HARDENED

Before the U.S.-Israeli attack in June 2025, Iran’s rulers had assumed they could indefinitely sustain a no-war, no-peace standoff with the United States and Israel. They were proved wrong, and the reckoning with that complacency began the moment the 12-day war ended. The new IRGC leadership expected the June cease-fire to collapse and another war to follow, possibly with the United States involved from the start. Iran’s universities, research institutions, think tanks, and government bodies began hosting debates about lessons learned and changes required. More institutional change took place in those eight months than in the previous ten years combined. Many executive decisions on trade, agriculture, and management of economic and social services were decentralized from Tehran to provincial capitals. And the organizations overseeing propaganda, communication with domestic audiences, and information dissemination abroad underwent a generational overhaul. Institutional lethargy had long defined the Islamic Republic’s bureaucracy; now it gave way to the imperative of rapid adaptation. In the process, the technocratic decision-makers took charge.

After Khamenei was killed in a U.S.-Israeli airstrike, the succession of his son Mojtaba was swift and remarkably orderly. The new generation that had emerged from the June 2025 war chose him in part because he had long championed them. Mojtaba was a member of the IRGC and fought in the Iran-Iraq War before entering the seminary to become a cleric. He later served at his father’s side, overseeing the IRGC’s transformation and the rise of its future leadership. Mojtaba’s ascent confirmed and accelerated the generational transformation, producing not the institutional collapse Washington expected but its opposite.

The manner in which the elder Khamenei was killed, at his home rather than in a bunker, mattered enormously. The new leaders immediately framed his death as martyrdom, and that framing worked. Rather than demoralizing the system, Khamenei’s assassination gave the new generation of leaders direction and purpose; their first act was to mobilize the Islamic Republic’s rank and file around his death. That messaging also drew a larger segment of Iranian society to rally around the flag.

 

Iran’s conduct of the subsequent war reflected the new generation’s technocratic approach. The Islamic Republic had long operated through a chaotic maze of competing power centers, which produced unending internal debate and sclerotic inertia. But between the two wars, that chaos gave way to organizational discipline and resilience. A new Supreme Defense Council—led by the IRGC generals Abdolrahim Mousavi, Mohammad Pakpour, and Ali Shamkhani—was created to expedite military changes. Ghalibaf, a former IRGC general who became speaker of parliament in 2020, and Ali Larijani, the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, performed parallel roles in the civilian and economic bureaucracy, working through government ministries and municipal authorities. Veterans of the Iran-Iraq War, these men had learned to manage against insurmountable odds on the frontlines. Facing Iran’s biggest challenge since the 1980s, the revolution’s founding generation moved swiftly to reorganize statecraft around war. These older leaders oversaw the transition to the new generation, which quickly reorganized the scattered nodes of power into a coherent decision-making structure that could survive the loss of any single leader.

Iran’s armed forces were reorganized into a web of operational commands resembling a guerrilla force more than a conventional military, with authority concentrated among like-minded cohorts rather than distributed among various factions. Larijani, Mousavi, Pakpour, and Shamkhani were all killed in subsequent Israeli strikes, but the resilience they had helped build was not diminished.

On the battlefield, Iran’s armed forces applied the lessons of the June 2025 war with precision. They responded to the U.S.-Israeli assault that began in February 2026 with systematic salvos of missiles and drones designed to deplete U.S. and Israeli interceptor stockpiles across the region. They had concluded that their adversaries expected to destroy Iran’s missile capability quickly and were not prepared for a prolonged campaign. During the 2025 war, Israel had targeted the entrances to Iran’s “missile cities,” effectively sealing them and forcing Iran to launch mainly from eastern regions beyond Israel’s reach. Iran responded by dispersing its missile launchers across its vast geography and embedding engineers inside the missile cities, alongside military personnel, to repair damaged launchers and entrances in real time. This enabled Iran to continue firing longer than Israel and the United States had expected.

The IRGC also deployed cheap drones to overwhelm U.S. radar systems and military positions across the Persian Gulf and Israel, impeding the bombing campaign and opening missile routes to targets all over the region. Drawing on the logic of asymmetric warfare—and on the experience of using human-wave attacks to overwhelm Iraqi positions in the 1980s—Iran dispatched swarms of Shahed drones. These cheap, expendable weapons degraded the air defenses protecting U.S. bases, as well as those of Washington’s Arab allies, and opened corridors for precision missiles to strike high-value targets. The Iranian military had learned not just to absorb punishment but also to win strategic advantage by frustrating its adversaries’ war aims.

 

A NEW BALANCE OF POWER

The most significant victory for the new generation of leaders is simply that their strategy worked. The state survived decapitation. It withstood the punishing U.S. and Israeli bombardment, asserted control over the Strait of Hormuz, and faced down a U.S. naval blockade. In the process, it expanded the battlefield into the Persian Gulf, inflicting heavy damage on 16 U.S. bases and rendering several inoperable. In March, Iraqi militias compelled the United States to abandon Camp Victory, a major U.S. military installation in Baghdad that U.S. forces had occupied since 2003.

Iranian attacks also created a crisis of confidence among the Gulf states. The United States had brought war to their cities and vital infrastructure and failed to protect them. Their economies became collateral damage. The breach of trust between Gulf capitals and Washington will outlast the immediate conflict. It remains an open question how many U.S. bases will be rebuilt and whether the United States or its Arab allies will see much use in them against an Iran that has shown it can control the Strait of Hormuz.

By closing the strait and targeting energy infrastructure, Iran imposed significant costs on global energy markets and trade. That offensive—combining drone swarms, a “mosquito fleet” of fast boats, and the threat of mines—demonstrated a capability that Washington had long dismissed. Tehran regards the resulting stalemate as a new balance of power. The U.S. naval blockade has squeezed Iran’s economy, but at the cost of laying bare the strategic importance of Iran’s grip on the strait. By shifting from air war to naval blockade, the United States in effect admitted that Iran had changed the battlefield on which the conflict would unfold.

 

Trump embraced the naval blockade as the silver bullet that would win the war, but it only put more pressure on the global economy. The stalemate implied greater strategic parity, which the Iranian leadership underscored by saying that the war would end only when the United States and Iran lifted their chokeholds on the Persian Gulf. Going forward, control of the strait, an undeniably vital global economic chokepoint, will serve Tehran as an economic lever and a deterrent against future attacks. For Iran’s leaders, that newly realized power partly offsets costs it has incurred during the war, including the degradation of its Lebanese ally Hezbollah, and other setbacks it has endured in recent years, such as the loss of Syria as a strategic corridor after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, which had been Iran’s staunchest ally in the Arab world.

In Tehran’s view, the United States’ decades-long containment of Iran has come to an end. The new regional order will be defined less by American primacy than by multipolarity, with China an increasingly central player and Iran an integral rather than a marginal actor. Tehran intends to lock in these gains in any agreement that concludes the war. Its insistence on controlling the Strait of Hormuz and collecting tolls from passing ships, and its preconditions for talks—a cease-fire in Lebanon and an end to the U.S. naval blockade—reflect the leadership’s belief that the war has shifted the balance of power in its favor. Iran’s new rulers are negotiating accordingly.

STATECRAFT OVER IDEOLOGY

Iran secured these strategic gains by applying the lessons of the 12-day war with surprising swiftness. In June 2025, Iran found itself fighting war on Israel’s terms. This time, it was determined to fight on its own. Beyond the reorganization of the Iranian military, several specific developments stand out. One was Tehran’s assault on information infrastructure. Iranian commanders understood early that they could not match U.S. and Israeli advantages in satellite intelligence, precision strikes, and integrated air defense. What they could do was frustrate U.S. and Israeli battlefield decision-making by creating gaps between what sensors observed and what commanders interpreted. Strikes on U.S. radar installations across the Persian Gulf degraded the early warning and targeting infrastructure underpinning U.S. and Israeli air operations in the region. Iran worked systematically to erode the adversary’s technological edge rather than confront it directly.

Iran’s seizure of the Strait of Hormuz was another major development. Closing the strait had long been discussed in Tehran as a practical option—and long dismissed in Washington on the grounds that it would hurt Iran’s own exports. Besides, U.S. officials reasoned, the United States’ naval power could destroy Iran’s surface fleet at the outset of the war, effectively removing Tehran’s capability to close the strait. Iran proved all these assumptions wrong. For over four decades, Iran’s military doctrine had centered on asymmetric warfare designed to exploit the vulnerabilities of U.S. and Israeli conventional forces. It did not need a traditional navy to close the strait. Using drones, fast boats, and the threat of mines, it exercised control over the strait—calibrating pressure methodically, sustaining it for weeks, and avoiding the full confrontation it was not prepared to win.

 The Strait of Hormuz is now understood by all parties as an Iranian asset rather than an open sea-lane backed by an American guarantee. “Sanctions relief is not important for us anymore because we know it won’t come, and even if it comes it won’t be long-lasting,” one Iranian analyst told us. “We’re not making the same mistakes as before. Now managing Hormuz is the key.” This represents a fundamental reorientation of Iran’s economic strategy—away from pursuing reintegration into the Western-led financial system, which the new generation considers unattainable, and toward leveraging Iran’s command of critical geography.

 

The war has also compelled Tehran to deepen its tactical alignment with China, building something closer to a strategic partnership. The Iranian leadership has concluded that there is no path to normalization with the United States but that it cannot face U.S. and Israeli pressure alone. Beijing, Tehran believes, sees a resilient Iran as a worthy and proven ally. “Our Chinese friends believe that Iran’s international position has improved since the war began,” Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, said in May after meeting his Chinese counterpart in Beijing. “A new era of cooperation between Iran and China lies ahead.” Faced with the eventual task of rebuilding after the war, Iranian leaders are more open than ever to considering China as their primary external partner for reconstruction and economic recovery.

Tehran’s communications campaign during the war marked another break with the past. The Iranian government’s messaging through media and diplomatic channels demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of global audiences. Iranian embassies posted and shared viral content on social media, including animated music videos featuring Lego figures, that drove public conversation far beyond the Middle East. Iran’s framing of the war reached, and persuaded, audiences in the Arab world, Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and even in the United States and Europe. Iran’s strategic communication reflects the same technocratic dexterity that has characterized the military campaign.

Finally, Iranian leaders have come to understand that economic malaise is the greatest threat to their political stability. The lesson they drew from recent nationwide protests is that economic grievance acts as a force multiplier for the opposition. No sooner had the cease-fire been announced in April than the government moved ahead with an economic reform package, ending a number of subsidies and politically protected programs, a move that the leadership justified as necessary for managing the economic fallout of the war. The rush to publicize infrastructure reconstruction projects—bridges, railways, hospitals—signals that the government is moving toward a new social contract, one that will rest on demonstrated competence rather than ideology. The IRGC has made a public show of its technocratic capabilities on the battlefield. Whether it can bring the same efficiency to managing the economy is the question Iran’s new leaders are now asking themselves.

 

THE NATIONALIST TURN

In the aftermath of the mass uprisings and the subsequent massacre of protesters in January 2026, Iranians appeared united against the regime. The country’s politics were defined then by the rupture between a restless population tired of isolation and the deepening pain of U.S. economic sanctions and an increasingly unpopular and embattled government. The war has complicated that picture.

The war’s destruction has been vast: public infrastructure, factories, schools, hospitals, historic monuments, and even entire neighborhoods lie in ruins. As Israeli and American bombs and missiles pummeled the landscape, Trump threatened to arm separatists, redraw Iran’s borders, crush its economy, and annihilate its civilization. Together, these military and rhetorical assaults provoked a nationalist reaction that cut across political divisions. Public anger toward the regime has not disappeared. The grief, frustration, and accumulated resentment of decades of misrule and repression remain. What has changed is the political landscape in which those feelings find expression. Dissent is now refracted through a national struggle against a foreign enemy that Iranians compare to Alexander the Great, who conquered the Persian Empire in the fourth century BC; the Arab armies that invaded in the seventh century AD; and the Mongols, who came six centuries after that.

Contrary to American and Israeli expectations, the war has not sparked street demonstrations. The longer it went on, the less the regime appeared threatened by public uprisings. Iranian society mobilized not against the state but alongside it, holding daily rallies across the country, forming human chains to protect power plants, and gathering on bridges threatened by Trump. The sharp divide between state and society that had characterized Iran in January blurred—not through persuasion or repression, but through the shared experience of living through the bombing and witnessing its destruction.

 

According to a Bloomberg analysis, two-thirds of the targets struck in Tehran before the cease-fire were residential, commercial, and other civilian buildings. In interview after interview, Iranians described explosions that reverberated through their bodies night and day, leaving deep psychological wounds. To them, the Iranian armed forces were no longer the oppressors but the defenders. A chant heard at rallies across Iran to cheer on Iran’s missile and drone strikes captured the shift in mood: “Strike, for you strike so well.” As the Iranian philosopher and dissident Mohammad Mehdi Ardebili said in Tehran during the fifth week of the war: “In this moment in time, the Islamic Republic and Iran are one and the same. If the Islamic Republic falls, Iran falls.”

The sentiment extended to how the war was managed at home. Iranians noted, sometimes with surprise, that after weeks of bombardment and a naval blockade, there were no food or fuel shortages, and daily life continued largely uninterrupted. “Besides the bombs, it didn’t feel like we were at war,” one Tehran resident told us. “If the Islamic Republic can always manage society this efficiently, we wouldn’t have the number of complaints we usually have about them.” Such observations are not endorsements, but they do reflect a change in how Iranians view their leaders.

The government’s Internet shutdowns intensified this dynamic. When the government cut off outside information as a defense against U.S. and Israeli intelligence operations, Iranians were unhappy but had little choice but to turn to the domestic intranet and media. The blackout eliminated diaspora media and social media directed at mobilizing dissent, producing a different kind of national conversation. New and more complex perspectives took root, including about the IRGC, the security threats facing Iran, and what the country has built and must defend. “I always ignored or dismissed what the Revolutionary Guards or the governing system had to say about Israel or the United States,” said a longtime civil society organizer who had been repeatedly interrogated for their activism. “But these past few weeks, I only have access to internal Iranian messaging apps and news apps, and we’ve had to consider their positions and see the reality of being attacked on a daily basis.” A university professor told us: “The country has entered a national war, and a new identity is being forged.”

“ARE YOU IRANIAN ENOUGH?”

The Islamic Republic has always sought a social contract with its population, but the terms have shifted dramatically across its history. In the early years, that compact was based on revolutionary transformation and the redistribution of wealth. In the 1990s, it shifted to economic growth and limited social openings in exchange for political quiescence. Two decades ago, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad channeled oil revenues to the poor in exchange for loyalty to official ideology. His successor, Hassan Rouhani, promised economic growth through a nuclear deal and sanctions relief. All these efforts failed to create a stable relationship between state and society, to varying degrees and for different reasons.

What is now on offer is a nationalist-technocratic bargain, in which state legitimacy rests on a demonstrated ability to defend the country and rebuild it. The terms are national, not Islamic. State media is producing content that normalizes images of women with and without the hijab standing side by side, frames Iranian identity as cultural rather than purely religious, and reaches toward the parts of society that had most thoroughly rejected the Islamic Republic, such as the youth and the urban middle class.

This is not liberalization; in fact, the regime continues to crack down hard on political dissent. But the state now acknowledges that it needs a social base far larger than Islamic ideology alone can provide. Increasingly, the Islamic Republic looks less like a theocracy and more like a right-wing nationalist authoritarian state. Islamic ideology persists, but it is subordinated to the imperative of national cohesion. The test of political fealty is no longer “Are you Islamic enough?” but “Are you Iranian enough?” The mosque is still present, but the dominant political symbol on necklaces and lapel pins, worn by the young and old, is now the country’s map. Government rallies for the defense of the homeland are drawing even critics of the regime, some of whom paid a heavy price for their dissent in the past. These gatherings have become focal points for a nationalism centered on preserving Iranian civilization and celebrating survival with dignity in the face of overwhelming force.

The leadership understands that this is a unique and potentially fleeting moment. The same society that protected the power plants will return to its grievances once the immediate threat recedes. The Iranian people’s anger over repression, economic mismanagement, and mistreatment of women and minorities has been subordinated by war, not dissolved. The state’s concessions on social issues—the de facto relaxation of hijab enforcement, tolerance of concerts and women driving motorcycles—represent an attempt to make wartime unity durable before the political tide turns. Whether they are sufficient to fundamentally alter the relationship between state and society remains to be seen.

 

For Iran’s rulers, addressing economic grievances will be essential once the war ends. Washington assumes that Tehran remains interested in negotiating for sanctions relief. But the IRGC is not counting on diplomacy; it no longer believes the United States will ever lift sanctions. Rather, it seeks a deal that ends the war, consolidates Iran’s gains, and paves the way for economic dividends from taxing maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.

Washington interprets this new posture as obduracy born of ideological rigidity and factional rivalry in Tehran. “Unfortunately, the hard-liners with an apocalyptic vision of the future have the ultimate power in that country,” U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in April. “Our negotiators aren’t just negotiating with Iranians,” he added. “Those Iranians then have to negotiate with other Iranians in order to figure out what they can agree to, what they can offer, what they’re willing to do, even who they’re willing to meet with.” Vice President JD Vance echoed the sentiment in May. “Maybe the Iranians themselves aren’t quite clear in what direction they want to go,” he said. “They also are just a fractured country.”

Rubio and Vance are wrong. Tehran’s defiant approach reflects neither ideological rigidity nor factional infighting. Instead, it demonstrates Iran’s newfound confidence and the lessons learned from the war and previous rounds of talks. The country’s leaders understand that the United States is seeking to get from talks what it could not achieve in war and that Washington is not interested in a deal but in Iran’s surrender. Twice before, last June and in February, talks with the United States were interrupted by U.S. and Israeli strikes. And after a collapse in talks in Islamabad on April 12, Washington immediately imposed a naval blockade, followed by another demand for Iran’s unconditional surrender. Iranian leaders already claim they have won the war. They are not prepared to forfeit the gains they have made or to return to the containment cage they occupied before the war. This self-confidence—rooted in the belief that the war has empowered Iran rather than weakened it—is informing their international outlook. It is also central to the legitimacy they seek at home. Their diplomatic endgame must reflect what Iran’s defiance won in the war.

 

THE MULTIFRONT DOCTRINE

Iran’s pronounced turn to nationalism at home does not mean that Tehran will abandon its regional allies. It will not fundamentally renegotiate relationships with Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shiite militias in Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen. But it will manage them with more strategic discipline and less ideological romanticism. The new Iranian leadership will not sacrifice Iran’s interests at the altar of revolutionary solidarity. These alliances will be deployed as part of a coherent regional strategy designed to sustain Iran’s strategic depth against sustained U.S. and Israeli pressure.

Iranian strategists have concluded that it was a mistake, during the war in Gaza, to allow Israel time to fight the different nodes of Tehran’s “axis of resistance” one by one. The U.S.-Israeli strikes over the past year followed directly from that failure of coordination. But in February, having learned its lesson, Iran quickly activated Hezbollah in Lebanon and Iraqi militias simultaneously, creating a second front for Israel in Lebanon, expanding the war across the region, and compelling the United States to close Camp Victory in Iraq—which Tehran views as validation of its multifront doctrine.

Iranian commanders maintain their regional network not out of ideological desire to project power, but from the calculation that Iran cannot be fully sovereign as long as it faces military threats and economic strangulation by the United States and Israel. Iran’s insistence that negotiations with the United States are contingent on a cease-fire in Lebanon, and that a final agreement must end war on all fronts and reflect Iran’s strategic gains, illustrates this expansive view of regional defense. U.S. and Israeli policy, in Tehran’s analysis, aims at Israeli hegemony across the Middle East—a goal that requires a weak and broken Iran.

The axis of resistance, once dismissed by many Iranians as charity for an ideological cause, is now understood by a larger segment of the population as an instrument of national defense. Iran’s aim to prevent the United States from rebuilding its damaged radar installations in the Persian Gulf is another expression of the same logic—a deliberate effort to degrade the early warning infrastructure that has underpinned U.S. military dominance in waters Iran regards as its strategic backyard.

A NEW ISLAMIC REPUBLIC

The war has been a crucible, forging a new iteration of the Islamic Republic and the first major generational shift since its founding. Power no longer resides with the founders. The second generation now runs military and political affairs while the third and fourth direct communications and international outreach.

In its first years under Khomeini, the Islamic Republic was a revolutionary state: organized around ideological transformation, legitimized by the charismatic authority of the supreme leader and his claim to implement God’s will, and oriented in foreign policy toward exporting the revolution. After Khomeini’s death, in 1989, on through the reform era and the hard-line consolidation under Khamenei, the republic was a postrevolutionary state perpetually negotiating between its founding ideology and the demands of governance. The leadership managed an increasingly skeptical population through repression, patronage, and limited openings. It saw resistance to American influence as an anti-imperialist imperative, but it was still, above all, an Islamic republic, ruled by the founding generation and animated by its internal battles.

The republic born of the U.S.-Israeli wars is defined less by ideology than by nationalism, less by revolution than by statecraft, less by clerical charisma than by the confidence and technocratic ethos of a new officer class. In comparative terms, it resembles the military-led nationalist states of the twentieth century—Turkey under the later Kemalists, Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser—in which ideology persisted but was subordinated to national interest and the imperatives of state power.

This turn away from dogma and toward pragmatic statecraft does not make the Islamic Republic more benign. Nationalist security states are often brutal to their own people and destabilizing to the international order. The emergent Islamic Republic will remain highly authoritarian. But the categories that Western analysts have often used to describe its various factions—hard-liners versus moderates, ideologues versus reformists—will be less accurate than ever. The priorities of the new Islamic Republic, and how it pursues them, will be shaped by the specific experiences of its two wars with Israel and the United States: the losses Iran sustained, the confidence its leadership gained, and the new social contract the fighting has made necessary and possible.

 

Dark patterns on the web are designed to manipulate you – why aren’t they all illegal? by Gregory M. Dickinson

 

You open a free app to do one simple thing. Before you even start, a full-screen message asks whether you want to try the paid version. The “Start free trial” button is large, bright and hard to miss. The option to keep using the free version is smaller, buried at the bottom. The same prompt appears again tomorrow. And the day after that.

A lot of people look at screens like that and think, “Surely this has to be illegal.” We even have a name for them, “dark patterns.” They feel pushy. They waste time. They seem designed to wear you down. But in most cases, they are perfectly lawful.

“Dark pattern” is not a legal term with a clear boundary. It is a broad label for digital designs that nudge, pressure, confuse or trap users. As a legal scholar who studies consumer protection and digital design, I think the most important thing for readers to understand is that the label “dark pattern” covers a broad spectrum.

Some of that spectrum is just annoying. Some of it is aggressive salesmanship. And some of it crosses the line into deception or coercion. Federal and state consumer protection laws are mostly aimed at that last category. They do not ban every design choice people dislike, only those that trick or coerce.

 Annoying isn’t illegal

 That reality may sound unsatisfying, but it is not unusual. Offline life is full of things that are irritating but not unlawful. Think of the cashier who asks whether you want to sign up for the store credit card, then points out the discount you are turning down, then asks again. Most people know exactly what is happening. They roll their eyes, say no and try to shop somewhere else next time.

 The same is true online. A repeated pop-up can be obnoxious. A guilt-inducing button can be tacky. But consumers recognize ordinary annoyance for what it is. In many cases, the market answer is simple: Close the app, ignore the pitch or take your business elsewhere.

 Similarly, law does not ban persuasive sales pitches just because they are effective. A car salesperson who keeps steering you toward the upgraded model is trying to influence your choice. So is the airline clerk who offers travel insurance. So is the restaurant server who asks whether you want dessert. Salesmanship is nothing new. Digital design often borrows from familiar techniques.

That helps explain why lawmakers cannot simply outlaw “manipulation.” And so many interfaces are built to persuade, openly and lawfully.

 

What crosses the line

What the federal FTC Act and analogous state consumer-deception statutes usually care about is not whether a design is annoying. They focus on whether the design is likely to mislead a reasonable consumer. That is the core idea in modern consumer protection law.

So a design is likelier to be unlawful when it hides key facts, makes an optional choice look mandatory or tricks people about the effect of the button they are pressing. A fake countdown timer, a disguised ad, a misleading one-click purchase button or a cancellation path that looks finished when it is not are all different from ordinary hard selling. Those designs do not just pressure users; they can deceive them.

That is also why the app maker’s intent is not always the key question. In many consumer protection cases, a company does not get a free pass just because no one said, “Let’s trick people.” The legal question is often about effect: What would a reasonable user likely understand from this screen?

Research on dark patterns reinforces that concern. Even relatively mild designs can push people into choices they would not otherwise make. And regulators have increasingly focused on subscription flows, hidden fees and cancellation obstacles for exactly that reason.

 

Why it feels like dark patterns are everywhere

One reason people might think there are no laws against dark patterns is that they see them so often. But that frequency reflects that the term covers a wide range of conduct, from lawful nagging to outright deception.

It also reflects enforcement limits. Regulators cannot chase every irritating screen on every app and website. They have to prioritize the worst cases. That leaves a lot of borderline conduct in the wild, which makes the whole problem feel bigger and murkier to ordinary users.

So when people ask why there is not a law against dark patterns, the best answer is that there already is, but the law does not prohibit every annoying or high-pressure design. It targets lies, misleading cues and coercive obstacles.

That line can be fuzzy. But the fuzziness is not a mistake. It is what you get when the law tries to separate persuasion from deception in a world full of both.

The last ‘little crappy ship’: What’s the future for the US Navy’s troubled LCS? By Brad Lendon Brad Lendon

 

The US Navy commissioned the last of its 35 littoral combat ships, the USS Cleveland, earlier this month at a pier in its namesake Ohio city.

“Steel. Strength. Power,” acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao posted on social media to mark the occasion.

Critics of the littoral combat ship (LCS) program had some other descriptions.

“Easy meat,” said one.

“An experiment that didn’t work,” said another.

And an expensive one. The price of the program is pegged at $60 billion, but a 2023 report from the investigative journalism site ProPublica said the eventual cost could top $100 billion.

“One of the worst boondoggles in the military’s long history of buying overpriced and underperforming weapons systems,” the ProPublica report said. 

 The LCS are at what the Navy calls the “low-end” of its surface ship fleet. They’re smaller than its guided-missile destroyers, carry fewer crew, and have less firepower and defenses, but they’re faster and able to operate in more shallow waters. 

 

But after the ships have been plagued by a range of mechanical failures and mishaps since the first one was commissioned in 2008, they’ve earned a derisive interpretation of the LCS acronym, “little crappy ships.”

After the Cleveland entered the fleet last weekend on the shores of Lake Erie, the big question became – what now for the LCS?

How we got here

The LCS had its origins around the turn of the century, as naval planners looked for a smaller platform to work in coastal environments, where conditions might make larger warships like destroyers vulnerable, according to a 2017 Navy report. 

 

The service was also facing the retirement of older, larger ships and was looking for ways to maintain its fleet size with smaller surface combatants that could be built more quickly and cheaply than bigger vessels, the report said.

Then-Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Vern Clark decided to go with the LCS, a warship unlike anything the Navy had acquired before.

And that may have been part of the problem.

Critics argued “Admiral Clark first decided he needed a ship and only then turned to figuring out what the ship would do,” a 2014 report by then Undersecretary of the Navy Robert Work says. 

 

In that report, written to explain the origins and complications of the LCS program, Work said the Navy got the shipped it asked for – “and in some key aspects a better ship than expected.”

But he acknowledged the ship’s development was “marked by constant change” that obscured its role and left it ripe for criticism.

The Navy acknowledged it was trying something different with the LCS.

“The LCS program marked a significant shift in how the Navy approaches shipbuilding and fleet modernization emphasizing flexibility, speed, and cost-effective construction,” a Navy fact sheet says, adding that the ships were to be rapidly reconfigured as missions – mine countermeasures, anti-submarine warfare or surface warfare – changed. 

 

But the service didn’t settle on a single design, instead building two variants, the monohulled, steel-constructed Freedom class – like USS Cleveland – and the trimaran, aluminum-hulled Independence class.

A Navy fact sheet says it was expected there would be only one design chosen between plans submitted by builders Lockheed Martin and Austal USA, but two variants were chosen after competition between the two yielded “a highly efficient” shipbuilding process. 

 

But two variants complicate logistics and supply chains, critics say.

The Independence class is the bigger of the two, 422 feet long and 104 feet wide, compared with 388 feet long and 58 feet wide for the Freedom class. The latter has the bigger displacement, at 3,450 metric tons to 3,200.

Neither uses propellor propulsion or rudders; instead, gas turbines power high-speed water jets. The design allows the LCS to operate in shallower coastal waters and avoid getting tangled in wires or cables, like those that might tether mines.

An LCS commander once touted the ships as “a military jet ski with a flight deck and a gun.” 

 

In 2008, the first monohulled LCS, USS Freedom, was commissioned. In 2010, the first trimaran, USS Independence, followed.

Problems pile up

The LCS was envisioned as a key component of US naval power in areas dominating current headlines, like the Persian Gulf, where the US and Israel are at war with Iran, and the South China Sea, where the US and its allies are defending freedom of navigation.

Early proponents of the ship called it a “streetfighter,” according to the Navy report, speedy and able to combat small-boat swarms, but with the versatility to hunt mines like those Iran is reported to have laid in the Strait of Hormuz. 

 But problems began to mount. In January 2016, USS Fort Worth suffered damage to its propulsion system in Singapore. Though the problem was later found to be caused by operator error, the then-4-year-old ship was out of action for eight months. 

 And the incident was one of four mechanical problems with the LCS fleet in a year, staining the reputation of the ships’ reliability.

As the LCS problems materialized, Navy leaders thought money budgeted for the program could be better spent elsewhere. 

 

In 2021, it began decommissioning the oldest of the ships – totaling seven to date – including the USS Sioux City, which was decommissioned in 2023 after spending only five years in a fleet where ships are expected to last 25 years.

An eighth, USS Fort Worth, is expected to be retired in July, but Congress blocked plans to decommission even more, citing the service’s need for ships and a wish to protect taxpayer investments of billions of dollars.

So, the Navy is forging ahead trying to make the best of ships its leaders didn’t want just a few years ago. 

 The 2026 Navy shipbuilding plan released earlier this month calls the LCS “an essential low-end fleet capability … capable of complicating adversary decisions,” saying it can be an effective mine countermeasures platform and armed with the Naval Strike Missile for surface warfare action.

“The strategy for LCS is a transition from acquisition to sustainment and modernization to keep these ships relevant, combat credible, and reliable through their service lives,” the plan says. 

 

Analysts are skeptical.

“What remains to be seen is how useful they would actually be in a combat scenario, as they have never been in one,” Emma Salisbury, a non-resident senior fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s National Security Program, told CNN.

She said she’s seen no evidence that, in the current war with Iran, the three LCS deployed to the Middle East for minesweeping duties have done the job. When asked by CNN, US Central Command said it could not comment on what role the LCS have playing in the conflict. 

 When US Central Command announced in April it was beginning to set the conditions for mine clearing in the Strait of Hormuz, it was not LCS but destroyers that were the first to go through the waterway. 

 

Since the war began, at least two of the three LCS assigned to the gulf for minesweeping have been spotted as far away as Malaysia and Singapore.

Carl Schuster, a former US Navy captain, told CNN the LCS lacks enough anti-aircraft defenses for any real war-time role in contested waters.

Though the Navy said in 2025 it had begun upgrading LCS defenses to counter drones, Schuster is unconvinced.

“They are easy meat to a cruise missile, drone or aviation platform,” he said. 

 “They are all but helpless in any kind of threat scenario. Even anti-pirate patrols are too dangerous in areas where there is a hostile air, drone, missile or swarm threat,” he said.

The LCS is “an experiment that didn’t work as advertised, so the US Navy does its best to use the ships for what it can,” Salisbury added. 

 Both Salisbury and Schuster see the LCS as primarily stopgaps for the Navy, likely to give way to a new generation of frigates that was announced last December. 

 

Those ships, known for now as the FF (X), will be based on the Coast Guard’s Legend-class national security cutters. They’ll be bigger than the LCS, displacing 4,750 tons, according to a Navy document presented at a naval symposium in January reported by Naval News.

A Navy announcement of the new frigate from December 2025 said the service hopes to have the first hull in the water by 2028. The Navy could eventually field 50 to 65 of the new frigates, according to Naval News.

Schuster doesn’t see a bright or long future for the LCS fleet.

“They will be kept until the new (frigates) enter service in 3-4 years … Then they’ll be quietly retired one or two at a time.” 

 

Trump's Justice Department purges information about convicted Jan. 6 rioters from Pennsylvania by Rob Tornoe, Chris Palmer

 The Justice Department removed hundreds of pages from its website detailing prosecutions and convictions of people involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, including many from Philadelphia and across Pennsylvania.

It is the latest move by President Donald Trump's administration to rewrite the history of Jan. 6, a failed attempt by his supporters to overturn the 2020 election results.

News releases outlining a variety of components of Jan. 6 cases — including announcements of indictments, convictions, and sentences — were removed from the Justice Department's website ahead of Memorial Day weekend. The agency confirmed the purge Friday, saying in a statement posted to its "rapid response" account on X that there was "nothing 'quiet'" about the decision.

"We are proud to reverse the DOJ's weaponization under the Biden administration," the Justice Department said. "We will do everything in our power to make whole those who were persecuted for political purposes. This includes stripping DOJ's website of partisan propaganda."

Trump has taken a variety of steps to effectively rewrite the record of what happened that day. One of his first moves after taking office again in January 2025 was pardoning nearly every Jan. 6 defendant, describing them as "hostages" who had been "treated so badly." And even though a pardon does not erase a criminal case — it is added to the record of the case, and any restrictions stemming from a conviction are reversed — it nonetheless displayed his willingness to try to eliminate consequences for those who were charged with participating.

Months after that, the Trump administration unveiled a Jan. 6 page on the White House's official website that blamed Democrats for "certifying a fraud-ridden election, ignoring widespread irregularities, and weaponizing federal agencies to hunt down dissenters." And it said Trump's acts of clemency "corrected a historic wrong — freeing Americans who were unjustly punished and restoring fairness under the law."

Among the documents the DOJ recently deleted was a news release announcing the conviction of Zach Rehl, the former leader of the Philadelphia Proud Boys. He and four other Proud Boys leaders were found guilty for helping incite the insurrection at the Capitol, and Rehl had been sentenced to 15 years in prison before Trump commuted his sentence.

"The government's evidence at trial demonstrated the crucial role that these men and their followers played in breaking through the multiple security lines that protected the Capitol on January 6, 2021," former U.S. Attorney Matthew M. Graves said in a now-deleted statement. "Their crimes, and the crimes of other members of the mob that descended on the Capitol, struck at the very heart of our democracy."

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to questions Tuesday about when it began removing the information from its website, or whether it had ever conducted similar actions for other defendants who were later pardoned. Still, the effort appeared to be an ongoing — or imperfect — endeavor.

A news release announcing the indictment of Ryan Samsel — a Bucks County man found guilty of assaulting an officer, participating in a civil disorder, and obstructing an official proceeding of Congress — was deleted from the department's website. But a release hailing the role of prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney's Office in San Diego in convicting Samsel was still visible Tuesday.

There was also still a news release online detailing charges against two people who were accused of assaulting police officers at the Capitol. One of the men, Julian Khater, was a Somerset, N.J., native who later ran a smoothie shop in State College, Pa., and was sentenced in 2023 to six years in prison after pleading guilty to deploying pepper spray against the officers.

In addition, while the department had pulled down news releases detailing charges against Harrisburg native Riley Williams — who was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison for helping steal the laptop of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) — there was still a web page visible that linked to a lengthy document detailing Williams' actions that day.

Trump's $1.7 billion fund for Jan. 6 defendants faces criticism, lawsuits

The Justice Department's purge came as the administration was embroiled in another controversy tied to Jan. 6 — the intent to establish a $1.7 billion fund that could offer compensation to people prosecuted over their roles in the melee.

The fund was established by the department earlier this month as part of a settlement with Trump involving his unprecedented lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns.

The "anti-weaponization fund" already faces at least two lawsuits — one from two law enforcement officers attacked during the Capitol riot, and another from a group of plaintiffs that includes former federal prosecutors fired after working on the Jan. 6 investigation as well as the city of New Haven, Conn., which lost federal funding due to its "sanctuary policy."

The fund also faces bipartisan criticism on Capitol Hill. Philly-area Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R., Pa.) said he was "going to try and kill" Trump's fund, while Sen. Thom Tillis (R., N.C.) called it "stupid on stilts" and a "payout for punks."

"So the nation's top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops?" Sen. Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.), the former GOP leader, told reporters Friday. "Utterly stupid, morally wrong — take your pick."

Trump continues to falsely claim he won the 2020 election

Despite winning reelection in 2024, Trump continues to falsely claim he won the 2020 election, which he lost to former President Joe Biden.

In the last six months, Trump has made at least 107 references to the 2020 election being stolen or rigged, according to a new Reuters analysis of the president's public remarks and social media posts.

"If we had Jesus Christ come down and count the votes, I would have won California," Trump told Republicans earlier this month. "But it's a rigged vote."

Biden defeated Trump in California by more than 5.1 million votes in 2020, a margin of nearly 30 percentage points. Trump lost to Kamala Harris by 3.2 million votes in 2024.

Trump defeated Harris in Pennsylvania in 2024, but has continued to falsely claim he also won the state in 2020 after losing to Biden by just 81,000 votes. On Christmas Eve, during a call with a 5-year-old from Pennsylvania, Trump falsely said he won the state "three times."

For far-right extremists, the rise of a new enemy: women by Odette Yousef

 

Evidence tied to last week's deadly attack on a California mosque illustrates a violent ideology and playbook that is all too familiar to counterterrorism and extremism experts. A 75-page typewritten document, attributed to the teenage suspects, and a livestreamed video showing the attack show extensive grounding in far-right, neo-Nazi thinking.

But one facet of the ideology behind this attack has, so far, been left out of much mainstream coverage.

"He just flat out says he hates women and that they're the devil and they're destroying everything. And this is an important thing, because that kind of misogyny did not exist in white supremacist circles, say, 10, 15 years ago," said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. Bierich was referring to the first part of the written document, authored by one of the two suspects.

 

For many, the suspects' apparent misogyny may seem irrelevant, given that they targeted a Muslim house of worship. But Alex DiBranco, executive director and co-founder of the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism, says it is comparable to antisemitism, a foundational underpinning of white nationalist thinking that is rooted in conspiracy theories. Antisemitism has been an essential ideological component behind white supremacist attacks at mosques, retail establishments frequented by African Americans and Latinos, gay bars and schools.

"We've seen similar kinds of conspiratorial thinking about women 'pulling the strings behind the scenes' as well," DiBranco said. "And so the targeting of a mosque in San Diego is something that is interrelated not only with Islamophobia, but also with antisemitism and deep misogyny."

"Anti-feminist conspiracies"

DiBranco says that scholarship and news coverage of violence that is partly rooted in anti-women conspiracy theories has failed to keep pace with the spread of those dangerous beliefs. The attack at the Islamic Center of San Diego is the most recent example.

"I was surprised when I opened the manifesto – having looked at the prior media coverage – at how deeply blatant the misogyny was throughout," said DiBranco. "[One of the suspects] starts with talking about Jewish people as the No.1 enemy. And then in his next section says, 'And then right after Jews, women are the No. 1 enemy.' "

 

Just as writings of neo-Nazis and white nationalist killers often use offensive slurs for Jewish people, the document uses a dehumanizing term meant to shorthand "female humanoid organism."

"That section on women uses dehumanizing language that's really popular in the misogynist incel community," DiBranco said, referring to "involuntary celibate" communities, which have evolved into virulently misogynistic online spaces, and have even been linked to femicide. "[It's] a term that is intended to indicate that women are actually not human, that they are 'humanoid,' and this has been popular for a number of years."

DiBranco said that the line of thinking expressed in the suspects' writings follows a tired trope: that women are essentially responsible for everything wrong in the world. She has helped to develop a framework for this category of narrative, which she terms "anti-feminist conspiracies." She said that it is important to broaden public understanding of the ties between these narratives and white nationalist violence.

One of the clearest examples of an anti-feminist conspiracy theory that lay behind a neo-Nazi attack, DiBranco said, took place in Norway in 2011. There, a man killed 77 people, including dozens of teenagers at a summer camp. In that case, the perpetrator also left writings behind that outlined his beliefs.

"That manifesto was very clear as well about the fact that he saw feminism and women … responsible for the 'feminization' of the West and of Europe. They were responsible for what he views as a 'Muslim invasion,' " DiBranco said. "He adhered to another conspiracy theory called 'cultural Marxism,' he talked about anti-political correctness, and all of those things he actually rooted with the idea of feminism of Western women as the key problem."

 Beirich said there were also other signs that far-right extremist movements were trending toward full-throated endorsement of misogynistic conspiracism. She points to the 2014 "Gamergate" controversy, which blew the lid off of a culture of sexualized trolling and harassment in the video gaming space; and the culture of violent, anti-woman rhetoric nurtured on The Daily Stormer, once the main online messaging board for neo-Nazis. Still, Beirich, whose career tracking far-right extremism spans decades, said the degree to which this misogyny has spread is notable.

 

"It has completely infected the white supremacist realm," Beirich said. "Misogyny is as important, I would argue, as racism or neo-Nazi-ism now to people that traffic in these kinds of ideas and live in these cultures."

"It is an ideology that is heavily invested in the idea of 'cultural degeneracy' and what are the sources of it," said Elliot Chandler, CFO and researcher at Revontulet, a Norway-based company that does online threat monitoring. "And historically, femininity and the excessive expression of femininity is a core aspect of degeneracy. That is the classic, 'This is what the Nazis think' way of approaching it."

This panic over the "feminization" of society also plays a role in the extreme hostility toward LGBTQ people, and to inclusive agendas, said DiBranco.

"What's basically at stake at the core is they feel like they had a system in which cisgender white men were supreme and had unshaken dominance. And now these other forces, what they call 'cultural degeneracy,' are undermining that control that they felt … they had and that they felt … they had a right to," she said.

Following a "cultural script"

While the primacy of anti-women, or anti-feminist, conspiracism stands out to extremism experts, the attack at the mosque in San Diego has otherwise followed a predictable pattern. In fact, even as some conservative voices on social media falsely claimed that it was "staged," evidence so far suggests that the attack is one of the most ideologically clear-cut to have taken place in recent years.

"It's been a while since we've had … a true white nationalist attack in the vein of Brenton Tarrant," said Chandler. Tarrant is a terrorist whose deadly attack on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019 has inspired numerous similar acts of white supremacist violence.

 

The video and document attributed to the San Diego suspects were uploaded to an online forum where users share graphic media of murders, suicide, rape and torture. Both are filled with markers that call back to the Christchurch massacre. Matthew Kriner, executive director of the Institute for Countering Digital Extremism, said that the very creation of the video and document for public consumption strongly situates this attack within a specific subculture of far-right extremism.

"The perpetrators filmed their activities in the same script that we've seen previous accelerationist attackers do," Kriner said. "I think what we're seeing right off the bat is a recreation of the Tarrant model of the 'Saints attacker,' wherein Tarrant provided himself as a cultural script."

 

Accelerationism is a tactic embraced by a subset of far-right white supremacists and neo-Nazis. Its adherents promote terrorism and sabotage to incite a race war and to bring about social collapse. Their ultimate goal is to then rebuild society into a patriarchal, white ethnostate. "Saints culture" is a practice within accelerationist and white nationalist spaces, of glorifying and venerating people who have committed violence in pursuit of their ideological goal.

Kriner noted that in addition to referring to themselves as "Sons of Tarrant" in their presumed writings, their manner of dress for the attack, the white scrawlings on their weapons and their display of the "Sonnenrad" symbol on their clothing were all hallmarks of the Christchurch attack. He and other experts say the suspects likely created the document and video to shape their own legacy within that subculture and to guide and inspire others to copy them.

"That is the goal, is to [say], 'Look at what I am doing … remember me for it. … and venerate it. … And in that veneration, copy it. Do it yourself. Create more of it,'" explained Chandler. "That is one of the goals of accelerationism is that by engaging in accelerationism, more people will do it. … and then it will become this tidal wave of violence that will wash away society."

This model of movement violence has been disturbingly successful, Chandler said. The Christchurch attack provided inspiration for numerous attacks on U.S. soil. Those include a deadly 2019 massacre at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas; a white supremacist's 2022 shooting spree at a Tops grocery store in a predominantly African American neighborhood of Buffalo, New York; a 2022 mass shooting at a gay bar in Colorado Springs, Colo.; a 2023 attack on African Americans at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Fla. Outside of the U.S., it has similarly been tied to numerous instances of hate-driven violence.

 

"These movements, they're not confined by borders. They are truly transnational," said Beirich. "There have been killings in multiple countries motivated by the same idea: in Germany, in Norway, in the United States, in New Zealand, in Serbia not that long ago, in Bratislava, in Slovakia."

Turning a blind eye to far-right violence

Beirich and other extremism experts say the attack at the Islamic Center of San Diego is a clear warning signal that the longstanding problem of white supremacist terrorism has not gone away. And so it has rekindled concern over the Trump administration's pivot away from countering violent, far-right extremism domestically and abroad.

 

This month, the White House released the 2025 United States Counterterrorism Strategy document, outlining its priorities and approach to protecting the homeland. It highlights three major terrorist threats to the U.S.: narcoterrorists, Islamist terrorists and violent left-wing extremists. Nowhere does the document mention far right, neo-Nazi or white supremacist threats.

"Far-right terrorism is alive and well, but you wouldn't know it from reading this document," said Colin Clarke, executive director of the Soufan Center, a nonprofit that focuses on global security. "This is an unserious document written by unserious people about a deadly serious subject."

In addition to the omission of far-right terrorism, the document's mention of "violent secular political groups" who are "radically pro-transgender" and of political movements like the Muslim Brotherhood have raised eyebrows.

"I'm not sure … why gender should factor into a counterterrorism strategy, but there it is," Clarke said.

Although the strategy document opens with a rejection of partisanship in the work of assessing and countering security threats to the U.S., Clarke and others say the strategy reeks of partisanship. Clarke pointed out that former President Joe Biden's name is mentioned seven times throughout the document. Lebanese Hezbollah, a proxy of the Iranian government, with which the U.S. is currently at war, is mentioned twice.

 

In a statement about the counterterrorism strategy, the White House's principal deputy press secretary, Anna Kelly, wrote, in part, "When President Trump returned to the White House, four years of weakness, failure, surrender, and humiliation under the failed Biden administration came to an end. Today, our nation is strong, our borders are secure, and the United States is respected all over the world.

"I'd like to think about what threats myself and my family will face if we're going to a concert, a parade to the mall, and who is going to harm us," said Michael Duffin, a candidate for Virginia's 8th Congressional District and a former counterterrorism official at the State Department. "And it's not members of the Muslim Brotherhood. It's not members of the far left. It's white supremacists. It's people inspired by ISIS. And those are the actors that this national security strategy should be focused on."

"It's quite dangerous," said Clarke. "It makes the country less safe because it shows you what this administration is focused on and what it's not focused on, where we're going to dedicate resources and where we're not going to dedicate resources."

 

The teens who attacked the Islamic Center of San Diego were latest to cite prior atrocities by GENE JOHNSON

 

In rambling writings full of vitriol against a wide range of people, the teenagers who attacked the Islamic Center of San Diego this week, killing three men and themselves, left little doubt about the models for their violence.

Chief among them: the shooter who killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019.

Researchers who study extremism have long noted the resonance of the Christchurch attack among far-right assailants, attributing it to the extent of the violence, the document the killer posted concerning his views and actions, and — especially — his decision to livestream the massacre. Among those who apparently modeled attacks after Christchurch was a shooter who months later killed 22 people in a Texas Walmart.

 “Part of what we’re seeing in violent extremist communities online is wanting to emulate the attacks that have had the most kills — which is a disgusting thing to say, but it’s the reality,” said Katherine Keneally, director of threat analysis and prevention at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an anti-extremism organization. “There is this obsession and it’s just sort of gamifying of attacks.”

 

Cain Clark, 17, and Caleb Vazquez, 18, stormed the Islamic Center on Monday before being driven back outside by a security guard who exchanged gunfire with them as he initiated a lockdown, helping to protect 140 children, authorities have said.

The pair killed the guard, Amin Abdullah, and two other men before taking their own lives in a vehicle nearby.

Writings heavy on hate and grievance

They left behind a 74-page document — the same length as the one written by Christchurch shooter Brenton Tarrant. Like Tarrant’s, it cited a range of far-right ideological inspirations, including the notion that white people are being replaced by other populations, and offered self-interviews detailing their motives and goals.

And they called themselves “Sons of Tarrant.”

The writings include hateful rhetoric toward Jewish people, Muslims and Islam, as well as the LGBTQ+ community, Black people, women, and the political left and right. They indicated they were trying to accelerate the collapse of society. In his section, Vazquez wrote of having “some mental health issues” and being rejected by women.

 

Brian Levin, the founding director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University in San Bernardino, noted that while white supremacist writings dating to the 1970s offered a narrative blueprint for decentralized terror attacks, neo-Nazis decades ago favored an approach sometimes called the “propaganda of the deed” — the attack on its own was supposed to inspire copycats, even without written explanations.

The internet has made it easier to spread writings by attackers, and since a far-right attacker killed 77 people in Norway in 2011 and released a 1,500-page document, it has become more common for writings to accompany such atrocities, Levin said. Frequently the writings quote from past white-supremacist texts.

“This strategy of being another chapter in a continuing chain of extremism not only telegraphs that the movement is bigger than it is, but also its resilience — that it is reoccurring with a different set of violent actors, some of whom die in the process,” Levin said.

 

A contagion of mass violence

The shooting was the latest in a series of attacks on houses of worship. Threats and hate crimes targeting the Muslim and Jewish communities have risen since war began in the Middle East, forcing increases in security.

Keneally said she had mixed feelings about the media attention on the attacks: The public needs to understand what happened, but it also risks amplifying the killers’ message and spreading the contagion of mass violence. She said she has struggled with questions she has gotten about whether such attacks are motivated by nihilistic extremism, or accelerationist, neo-Nazi, or white supremacist ideologies.

 

“We’re trying to put people in buckets and we’re asking the why, but we’re not going back and looking at the how,” Keneally said. “How did these kids end up going down this route? How is social media playing a role in that?”

At 17 and 18, she said, healthy teenagers should be excited about graduating high school or entering young adulthood, not engaging with extremist ideologies.

Another form of inspiration

While hateful extremism inspired the teens to attack the Islamic center, it inspired the security guard, Abdullah, in another way: to defend it.

In an interview, his friend Khalid Alexander said Abdullah was increasingly concerned about negative rhetoric toward Muslims, including from politicians.

“He recognized a direct kind of correlation between the threat of the community he was protecting and the types of, really, hate that was being spewed on television in an anti-Muslim, anti-Black, anti-immigrant feeling,” Alexander said. “And so he was keenly aware of the dangers of his job. And that’s exactly why he chose to do it.”

___

Johnson reported from Seattle. Associated Press writers Julie Watson in San Diego and Safiyah Riddle in Montgomery, Alabama, contributed.

Researchers say the Trump administration is finding new ways to punish science by Katia Riddle

 

Standing in his laboratory, Harvard professor Sean Eddy gazes at a row of vacant work stations. More than a year ago, this lab was filled with over a dozen researchers. On a given day they might be working independently on analyzing genomic sequencing or gathered around the group table, drinking coffee and helping each other troubleshoot questions about genomic data from different species.

Now, after his funding was terminated under the Trump administration, the computer screens are gone and the room is silent. He's one of the last people left.

" Seeing these labs empty — this is not the way it's supposed to be," he says. "This was a very vibrant lab."

 

Eddy is a computational biologist. He has devoted his career to one fundamental question. " I'm really interested in the origin of life," he says. "I want to know where it all came from."

He and his colleagues spent years developing software that could be used to seek out an answer. Scientists around the world now use the tools his team created to compare DNA and protein sequences, identify genes, and predict what they do. Their work underpins countless studies, including research related to cancer and neurodevelopmental disorders.

It's hard to quantify how much modern science relies on what his team built. Eddy describes its use as being as ubiquitous as microscopes or pipettes.

 

It's very affirming for me to pick up sort of semi-random papers in the literature in fields that I care about and see them using our software over and over again," he says.

When the lab was designed more than a decade ago, he worked closely with an architect. On the wall are pictures of animals. His daughter, who was 12 at the time, stenciled them for him. Mixed in with pictures of mice and fish are laboratory creatures. "There's a bacterial virus called T4 that I did my thesis on," he says, pointing to the wall.

 

In 2025, Eddy received a letter from the National Institutes of Health, informing him that his work "had been determined to be of absolutely no value to the US taxpayer, and therefore it was being specifically terminated," he recalls.

Eddy is one of thousands of researchers across the U.S. still grappling with the damage inflicted on science in 2025 under the Trump administration — despite a restoration of funding earlier this year.

Left guessing 

At the time he received the letter, Eddy had more than a dozen people working for him. Over the last year he's had to let almost all of them go. He's worked closely with them to help find jobs elsewhere.

Eddy says he has given up on any dream that his funding would be restored. "I haven't talked to my program officer in years now," he says. "My guess is that he's under instructions not to talk to me. So we're just sort of left guessing what the status of the grant is."

 He estimates the funding loss set him and his lab back by a decade. At 60, Eddy had planned to continue working through the next decade with his team. "For someone of my career stage, this is probably not recoverable," he says.

 

Walking through the empty lab, he looks at the bare desks where his team used to sit. He'd like to see this lab taken over by a younger computational biologist, someone who could pick up where he left off. But with Harvard now on a hiring freeze, he says, he doesn't see that happening anytime soon.

Money on paper — but not in practice

Champions of science celebrated a rare bipartisan victory in the early months of 2026. After the Trump administration tried to cut, freeze or suspend billions of dollars the previous year, a handful of Republicans — at the urging of their constituents — joined Democratic colleagues in an effort to quietly restore significant portions of that funding through the appropriations process.

 

Now, many of those same advocates are warning that money is not reaching scientists at the rate it should be, and that a lack of transparency at the agency is compromising the integrity and reliability of its research.

"In the past you had a pretty good sense of how NIH was gonna behave," says Jeremy Berg, a former high-ranking official at NIH who has become a kind of watchdog for the organization. When the Trump administration started slashing funding for NIH, Berg took it personally. " Now that level of trust is pretty much gone," he says.

In the past, says Berg, there was an ethos in the agency that dictated clear deadlines, funding forecasts, and expectations from researchers. This reliability fostered good science, Berg says. He credits the institution with funding and fostering much of the progress in biomedical research in the past few decades — such as mapping the human genome, major advances in cancer care, or new therapies for HIV and AIDS.

Berg recalls something a Republican senator once told him about the agency. "He used to refer to it not just as the crown jewel in biomedical research, but as the crown jewel in the federal government," he says. "I think that one can make a pretty strong case for that."

 

When the cuts hit, he started tracking their progress, charting the changes over the last year. In 2026, Berg says the budget may look intact on paper. However, he says NIH has switched the strategy to making fewer grants with more money over more years, an accounting shift that means fewer scientists are getting funding.

Berg's analysis showed that at one point earlier this year, NIH had issued roughly 2,300 new grants — about half as many as at the same point the previous year.

"There's a lot of pain and a lot of science that isn't gonna get done," he says.

 Advocacy groups have also been sounding alarm bells about a lack of transparency at NIH. Money approved by Congress this year has been slow to reach researchers, they say. Analysis from the Association of American Universities showed that NIH issued 66 percent fewer grant awards in the first few months of 2026 than they did the previous year.

 

" I'm sadly watching the agency where I worked for so many years be dismantled," says Elizabeth Ginexi, who was a program officer at the agency for 22 years, working on substance use prevention. She left when the Trump administration started making cuts, fearing she would be cut anyway.

She's been looking for a job for over a year.

In the meantime, Ginexi's been analyzing something on the NIH website called forecasts, areas of research the agency would like to fund. Typically these forecasts give direction to scientists who are applying for research money.

Ginexi started tracking them when she observed that they were not being filled as quickly as they had in the past. "There are tons and tons of them — starting from last year — that are still sitting as forecasts and were never published," she explains.

 

Her research shows that of 336 NIH funding forecasts still listed as open, 205 were already past their promised posting date with no full announcement ever published. It's a way, she says, of giving the illusion of funding opportunities, even as they fail to materialize.

Chances of funding? "Basically zero"

Sitting at her lab, cancer researcher Rachael Sirianni scrolls down the website for the NIH, monitoring the grants she's submitted that are waiting for the agency to review. She looks at one application. " The chances of that grant being funded in 2026 are basically zero," she says.

Sirianni had been counting on that grant to continue evaluating a combination of medications for treating children with cancer that had metastasized to the brain. The drugs together offered a "one-two punch," she says, and was showing a lot of promise. She figured with this progress, she'd be able to secure more funding for her work. But she hasn't been able to see it through the normal review process at NIH.

 

Many of the families grappling with this condition have no other options for dealing with this kind of pediatric cancer, which is basically impossible to remove or mitigate.

"It's thin and it's across the soft tissues of the brain and spinal cord," she explains. "There isn't really a consistent neurosurgical solution to that cancer complication."

Sirianni is a biomedical engineer. Earlier in her career, while working at a research institute, she met a family who lost a child to a type of cancer considered unsurvivable. "Being exposed to that family's pain, especially when I had become a parent myself," she says, "was pretty personally transformative."

In 2022, she moved her young family from Texas to Worcester, Mass., a city of a little over 200,000 an hour outside Boston, to build a lab at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School and run pediatric cancer studies.

For this particular grant, Sirianni worked with a colleague for several years before they submitted their proposal for funding, carefully tracking compliance requirements and watching deadlines. In the last year, these deadlines have been repeatedly moved, making it now impossible for the grant to even be reviewed in time for funding.

 

Sirianni looks at one laboratory bench that is full of equipment — reagent bottles and pipettes. She's had to lay off the researcher who was working here. "I can't bring myself to clear his bench," she says. "It makes me sad."

In response to her concerns and those laid out by other researchers in this story, a spokesperson from Health and Human Services, Andrew Nixon, acknowledged the slowdown in funding and attributed the delays to the government shutdown and congressional Democrats.

"Timelines have returned to typical funding patterns," he wrote in an email to NPR.

Both Sirianni and Eddy say for them, it's too late to restart their research. "That means that the therapeutic development work that taxpayers previously invested in is now hitting a brick wall," says Sirianni.

 Even as just a citizen of the country, this frustrates me," she says. "It's a loss of investment. It's a loss of momentum for the families that have children that are affected by these tumors. Every month, every week — that matters to them."