Good morning. Graham Platner, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine and a onetime rising star of the progressive movement, suspended his campaign last night under intense pressure after a woman accused him of rape. Platner said in a video address that the allegations against him were false. We’ll get to that below, along with a close look at yesterday’s nominations for the Emmy Awards. But let’s start, as we have so often this year, with Iran.
Are we at war again?You’d be forgiven for thinking so. After Iran attacked ships in the Strait of Hormuz, the United States responded with new attacks on Iran. And Iran fired missiles and drones at U.S. military installations in Bahrain and Kuwait. The American military said it hit around 90 targets. Explosions were reported in at least three port cities along Iran’s southeastern coast, according to Iranian state media. The U.S. Central Command called it retaliation for “recent unjustified aggression against commercial shipping and civilian crews.” Here’s the latest. The return strikes were not, perhaps, surprising. Speaking at the NATO summit in Turkey yesterday, President Trump threatened major new combat operations against Iran, including the seizure of Kharg Island, where Iran stages its oil for world markets, and attacks on the country’s infrastructure and desalination plants. Moreover, he called Iran “scum” and its leaders “cuckoo.” “There’s something wrong with them,” Trump said. “We said, ‘Go and do your funeral stuff,’ and instead of that, they start shooting rockets at ships.” (That “funeral stuff,” for what it’s worth, was the funeral cortege for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the former supreme leader who was killed at the start of the war in February.) There was much saber rattling, then, and some actual sabering, too. But a return to full-scale war? There isn’t much domestic support for that. That’s even true for some of Trump’s Republican allies, who voted for measures in the House and the Senate to check his power to continue the fight. Also, this war has been bad for business. Oil prices spiked yesterday. The stock market fluctuated. And what’s bad for business in the United States is bad for the electability of the party in charge. The midterm elections are less than four months away. “No one is more aware of that calendar,” David Sanger wrote yesterday, “than the Iranian leadership.” Which may leave us in a gray area, David reports of Trump’s intentions: He could elect to live in a world of neither war nor peace, an era of episodic skirmishes in the Persian Gulf, punctuated by periodic negotiations, with traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a key oil-shipping route, greatly reduced from the 130 or so ships that passed through each day before the war. The energy markets would most likely adjust; to some degree they already have. But for a president who promised a quick, cost-free confrontation with an old adversary — “four to six weeks” was the White House prediction in the opening weeks — an ongoing conflict would amount to near-total failure on the mission he initially set out upon. And the price would be staggering: The Pentagon has already asked Congress for about $70 billion to cover the early operations around Iran, and the cost rises every week. I was particularly struck by something a security expert and former aide to John McCain told David about the uncertainty yesterday. “The likeliest outcome is a continuing series of low-level, tit-for-tat attacks,” he said, “followed by frantic diplomacy by mediators, the emergence of a new and fragile cease-fire, and then probably another round of strikes.” He added: “It will be a long oscillation between cold war and low-level hot war.”
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