“Republicans are in a place where they prefer to see Democrats: caught in a bind on US-Israel relations,” Semafor reports. 

“Many GOP lawmakers don’t like the tense dynamic between President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the Iran war, particularly the rift between them that reopened over the weekend. Trump publicly told Netanyahu not to retaliate against Iran only to watch Netanyahu briefly forge ahead anyway.”

Washington Post: Trump’s grip on the GOP leaves Netanyahu with few places to turn. 

New York Post: Trump scolds Netanyahu in testy phone call.

Wall Street Journal: “As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu weighed how to respond to waves of Iranian missile attacks Sunday night, President Trump called with a message: Stand down.”

“But as it became clear the Israeli leader wouldn’t ignore a direct attack, Trump shifted his tone. Keep it limited, and don’t let it escalate, he said according to people familiar with the conversation.”

“Trump had hoped to contain the flare-up in fighting to keep it from disrupting work on a peace deal he is trying to hammer out with Tehran. His struggle to squelch Israel’s retaliatory strikes shows the difficulty of managing a situation in which the U.S. and Israel’s priorities are diverging sharply, particularly over Lebanon, as he tries to wind down the war.”

Anne Applebaum: “Ukrainian military technology has been evolving rapidly since the first years of the war. But only now are outsiders—in Europe, the United States, the Persian Gulf, and of course Russia—beginning to understand what that evolution means.”

“Since 2022, many public arguments about the war, even in Europe and the U.S., have adopted the narrative put out by Russian propaganda, tacitly assuming that Ukraine, outmanned and outgunned, would eventually lose. Helping Ukraine was a way to stave off disaster, nothing more. When the Trump administration stopped sending military and financial aid to Kyiv in 2025, some in Washington expected (and maybe wanted) the end to come quickly.”

“Instead, Europeans have provided money. Ukrainian society produced networked situational awareness. And when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky toured the Gulf states in late March and signed a series of security agreements, something changed in the international narrative.”