U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping had a phone conversation on Tuesday, the first time the two leaders have spoken since their in-person meeting in November.
As has happened following previous conversations, there is a considerable difference between the Chinese and U.S. readouts of the conversation. While both sides stressed the importance of maintaining open lines of communication, the official White House readout as usual placed a high stress on cautioning China against a variety of actions while saying virtually nothing about the clear need to undertake constructive actions to address common problems, such as those regarding climate change and pandemics.
Equally important, as in past such readouts on conversations held between U.S. and Chinese officials, Beijing listed a set of assurances that Biden has supposedly made several times to Xi regarding Taiwan, U.S. alliances, and other critical security issues. And yet the U.S. side, as in the past, again failed to mention such assurances in its official readout of the conversation.
Why is it that Washington will not confirm, clearly and unambiguously, that Biden either has or has not made all such assurances to the Chinese side? Various lower-level officials have at times made some of these assurances. But to my knowledge no U.S. official has made all of them. And Biden has not personally confirmed that he has made all such assurances.
The failure to clear up this apparent disparity in messaging on these crucial issues could eventually produce Chinese expectations and perhaps even pressure on the U.S. that Washington pushes back against, thus creating a crisis in relations. Washington needs to do more to build constructive relations with Beijing on both sides' vital interests, and clarify its stance regarding Biden’s supposed assurances. This is particularly necessary with regard to the administration’s policies regarding Taiwan. See my recent brief on what the White House needs to say and what Beijing needs to do on that critical issue.
Michael D. Swaine is a Senior Research Fellow on East Asia at the Quincy Institute and is one of the most prominent American scholars of Chinese security studies.
FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Joe Biden meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the G20 leaders' summit in Bali, Indonesia, November 14, 2022. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Joe Biden meets with Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the G20 leaders' summit in Bali, Indonesia, November 14, 2022. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque/File Photo
Top photo credit: A rescue personnel walks next to a damaged vehicle at an impact site following missile attack from Iran on Israel, in Ramat Gan, Israel, June 14, 2025. REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY
Israel’s war of choice with Iran is proving far less decisive than President Donald Trump initially believed when he praised Israel’s performance as “excellent.” What now appears to be an escalating, inconclusive conflict with no clear end in sight will soon force Trump into a challenging decision: end the war — or enter it.
Israel’s opening strike was undoubtedly a tactical success. Caught off guard by the assumption that Israel wouldn’t act before the sixth round of nuclear talks, Iranian leaders had taken no precautions. Many were asleep in their homes in northern Tehran, alongside their families, when Israeli strikes killed them in their beds. Iran’s air defenses were also unprepared and inactive.
Israel aimed to eliminate as many Iranian commanders as possible to disrupt Iran’s command and control structure and effectively paralyze its military response. Initially, the strikes were so successful — and Iran so subdued — that it was unclear whether Tehran retained any meaningful capacity to retaliate.
Impressed by Israel’s early success, Trump moved quickly to claim credit for the operation, despite Secretary of State Marco Rubio having declared just hours earlier that the strikes were a "unilateral action" by Israel and that the U.S. was not involved. As the saying goes: success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.
But within 18 hours, Iran had restructured its chain of command, activated its air defenses, and, most critically, launched four missile barrages aimed primarily at Israeli air defense systems. Many of the missiles penetrated Israel’s multilayered defenses, lighting up the Tel Aviv skyline as they struck their targets — including a direct hit on Israel’s Ministry of Defense.
That Tehran could mount such a response just hours after losing several top military commanders was the first clear sign that Israel’s initial success would be short-lived.
Although Iran continued to absorb heavy blows on Saturday — including Israeli strikes on oil refineries, Mehrabad Airport in Tehran, and other civilian and economic infrastructure — it responded with additional missile barrages. These were fewer in number but notably more effective. As Israel’s air defenses degrade, Tehran is likely to shift to missiles with larger warheads, increasing the scale of destruction.
Meanwhile, despite inflicting significant damage on the Natanz nuclear site, Israel has failed to penetrate the far more critical and heavily fortified Fordow facility. As a result, the actual impact on Iran’s nuclear program appears limited. Reports indicate that the U.S. military has provided its missile defense capabilities to shoot down Iranian drones and missiles but it has so far not joined Israel in offensive strikes.
It is becoming increasingly clear to Washington that Israel’s war of choice is far from a success, and a decisive outcome may not materialize at all. While Israel likely holds escalation dominance, it faces a critical disadvantage: it has fewer air defense interceptors than Iran has long-range missiles. Israel needs a swift and decisive victory — but a prolonged war of attrition may ultimately favor Iran. And such a victory now seems out of reach.
Unsurprisingly, Israeli officials and their allies in Washington — including groups like the Foundation for Defense of Democracies — have begun lobbying President Trump to bring the U.S. into the war and to join them in offensive strikes. For Trump, this must be a serious letdown. Aware of his reluctance to launch another Middle East war, the Netanyahu government had recalibrated its approach when it pressed Trump earlier in January: rather than urging the U.S. to strike Iran directly, it sought a green light for Israel to act. Through an intense lobbying campaign, Israel appears to have secured at least tacit approval from Trump for this campaign.
Just 24 hours into its war of choice with Iran, Israel was already back in Washington, knocking on Trump’s door with new demands. What began as “Give us the green light and Israel will bomb Iran for America” quickly shifted to “Hurry up, America, and bomb Iran for Israel!”
Israel faces two key challenges with this request. First, seeking America’s blessing to go to war is a far lighter ask than requesting America’s direct military involvement. Trump, unexpectedly, agreed to the former — but it would be exceptionally unwise for him to agree to the latter.
Secondly, as noted earlier, Trump likes winners — and by asking him to intervene, Israel is signaling that it’s losing. It has failed to eliminate Iran’s regime or cripple its nuclear program, and is now absorbing unexpected blows in return (today Iran sent a barrage of missiles during daytime rather than night to throw the Israelis off). Why would Trump risk American lives, endanger his presidency, and join a war he didn’t start — just to rescue Israel from a failed and unprovoked conflict? Trump prefers to take credit for victories, not inherit blame for someone else’s potential fiasco.
After all, it was Israel that persuaded Trump to adopt the zero-enrichment negotiating stance — the very position that led to the diplomatic deadlock Israel later exploited to secure a green light for its faltering military campaign. Had Trump stuck to his original red line — no weaponization — he might now be on the verge of a historic nuclear agreement with Iran.
Trump listened to Netanyahu—just as he did to John Bolton and Mike Pompeo in 2018—and once again, his path to an America First deal with Iran was derailed. This is precisely the outcome Netanyahu sought. If it’s not what Trump wants, he should change course immediately—just as he did in Yemen. Rather than joining Israel’s war, he should compel Israel to end it.
With its unprovoked war, Israel has undermined Trump’s negotiating position in two key ways. First, support for acquiring a nuclear weapon has surged among Iran’s elite and broader society in response to the Israeli bombings. This has raised the political cost for Tehran to agree to limit enrichment to civilian levels, making a deal more difficult.
Second, America’s backing of Israel’s attack — coupled with Trump’s self-congratulatory rhetoric — has led Tehran to believe he deliberately lulled Iran into a false sense of security to boost Israel’s chances. As a result, what little trust remained in Trump as a negotiating partner has further eroded. And the less trust there is, the narrower the path to a deal.
Still, a deal remains possible. But the sooner Trump halts Israel’s war, the better his chances. One thing is certain: if Trump and Iran return to the negotiating table, he must quickly abandon the self-defeating zero-enrichment demand championed by Israel and Bolton — the very stance that gave birth to this needless and messy war.
When Israeli warplanes struckIran this week — violating Iranian sovereignty in a brazen act of aggression, killing scores of civilians alongside top military commanders and nuclear scientists and inviting Iran’s equally indiscriminate retaliatory strikes — Europe’s leaders didn’t condemn the attack.
They perversely endorsed it and condemned Iran for the attacks on its own territory.
The president of France Emmanuel Macron set the tone by condemning Iran’s “ongoing nuclear program” and reaffirming “Israel’s right to defend itself and secure its security.” President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen seemed to have spoken from the same script “reiterating Israel’s right to defend itself,” embellished by some generic platitudes about the need for restraint and de-escalation.
The German foreign ministry went a step further and actually “strongly condemned” Iran for “an indiscriminate attack on Israeli territory” — even before Tehran launched its missiles in response for Israel’s attack on its territory — while fully endorsing Israel’s actions.
This Orwellian rhetoric isn’t just incompetence or ignorance. It’s the culmination of years of European diplomatic malpractice that helped to manufacture this crisis — and exposed the "rules-based order" as a corpse. Europe’s double standards killed its credibility.
Europe’s stance on Ukraine invoked Article 2(4) of the U.N. Charter with political clarity: "All members shall refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity of any state." Yet when Israel attacked Iran — with no legal basis for self-defense — Europe de-facto reframed aggression as virtue, and condoned it.
Europe’s moral and diplomatic collapse hasn’t gone unnoticed. Two globally respected voices delivered particularly damning verdicts. Mohamed ElBaradei, Nobel Laureate and former head of the U.N.’s atomic energy watchdog, offered a humiliating crash course in international law to the German foreign ministry.
Reacting to Berlin’s endorsement of Israel’s “targeted strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities” (never mind the hundreds of civilians killed in these strikes), El Baradei reminded it that such strikes are prohibited under the Geneva Conventions to which Germany is a party, and that the use of force in international relations “is generally prohibited in the UN Charter with the exception of the right of self-defense in the case of armed attack or upon authorization by the Security Council in the case of collective security action.”
For her part, Francesca Albanese, U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, reacting to Macron’s statement, commented that “on the day Israel, unprovoked, has attacked Iran, the president of a major European power, finally admits that in the Middle East, Israel, and only Israel, has the right to defend itself.”
The message of the likes of El Baradei and Albanese is unequivocal: when Europe applauds Israel’s strike while condemning Russia’s invasion, it doesn’t uphold universal rules — it enforces its tribalist identity: “rules” only apply to adversaries, not friends. This is fatal to Europe’s pretense of moral authority — it has been well noticed in the Global South, but also among many European citizens too.
This pretense looks even more detached from reality given that the crisis in the Middle East erupted on fertile ground prepared by serial European failure. First it was the E3 (Britain, France, Germany) failure to uphold the JCPOA following the U.S. withdrawal under Donald Trump’s presidency in 2018. While the EU offered rhetorical support for the nuclear deal, it buckled to U.S. sanctions and refused to shield EU firms willing to engage with Iran. It let the JCPOA die, de-facto creating a vacuum for escalation.
Further, while mediators like Oman and Qatar brokered talks on a new nuclear deal between the U.S. and Iran, the EU pushed for an IAEA resolution censoring Iran days before Israel’s strike, torpedoing de-escalation and contributing to creating a more menacing, dangerous security environment, with the U.N. Security Council sanctions snapback and potential Iran’s withdrawal from the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) lurking in the background.
Each of these failures validated Tehran’s view that it is futile to negotiate with Europe. The E3/EU are now seen not just as a weak party unable to fulfil its commitments under the nuclear agreement, but also an actively destructive player undermining Iran’s security and regional stability.
European powers’ staggering descent into diplomatic irrelevance was starkly illustrated by Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi’s categorical rejection of his British counterpart David Lammy’s pleas to de-escalate. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine why Tehran should heed these calls when they come from parties it sees as actively colluding with the aggressors.
The likely fallout from Europe’s diplomatic self-sabotage is that it incinerated whatever residual trust it still had in Iran and the broader Global South. It all but guaranteed proliferation by giving Iranians — now not just the hardliners — a powerful incentive to seek nuclear weaponization, an outcome that could have been avoided had Europe engaged in serious, good faith talks with Iran on reviving the nuclear deal. Iran’s withdrawal from the NPT is no longer a merely theoretical possibility.
All of these developments dramatically increase the likelihood of blowback against European interests: a regional war in the Middle East means more uncontrolled migration, heightened risks of terrorism on European soil or against European interests in the region, and energy shocks if Iran delivers on its threats to block the Hormuz Straight, the world’s principal oil trade artery.
Absent an urgent but unlikely course correction, such as holding Israel accountable for its regional aggression, Europe’s decay will accelerate. When Brussels exempts allies from rules imposed on rivals, it doesn’t preserve peace — it signs its own geopolitical suicide note.
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Top photo credit: Charlie Kirk, Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson (Gage Skidmore/Creative Commons)
The Republican president who vowed to “Make America Great Again” by ending “endless wars” now finds himself on the precipice of a potential new one.
Israel’s airstrikes on Iran Thursday came after President Donald Trump said he was hopeful for a nuclear deal and made clear publicly that he did not want Israel to interfere by acting militarily.
Israel defied Trump. Trump now says he knew about the strikes all along.
The president wrote on Truth Social early Friday, “I gave Iran chance after chance to make a deal. I told them, in the strongest of words, to ‘just do it,’ but no matter how hard they tried, no matter how close they got, they just couldn’t get it done.” He went on:
“Certain Iranian hardliner’s spoke bravely, but they didn’t know what was about to happen. They are all DEAD now, and it will only get worse!” Trump said. “Iran must make a deal, before there is nothing left, and save what was once known as the Iranian Empire. No more death, no more destruction, JUST DO IT, BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE.”
Trump’s next move is unknown. But some of the most prominent voices within his extended MAGA movement are pleading with the president not to drag the U.S. into another Middle Eastern war.
Tucker Carlson says Trump is complicit in the strikes and insists that this isn’t America’sfight.
“While the American military may not have physically perpetrated the assault, years of funding and sending weapons to Israel, which Donald Trump just bragged about on Truth Social, undeniably place the U.S. at the center of last night’s events,” Carlson wrote in his Friday newsletter to paid subscribers.
“Washington knew these attacks would happen,” he added. “They aided Israel in carrying them out.”
“It’s worth taking a step back and wondering how any of this helps the United States,” the newsletter reads. “We can’t think of a single way.”
Carlson continued, “If Israel wants to wage this war, it has every right to do so. It is a sovereign country, and it can do as it pleases. But not with America’s backing.”
Citing Trump’s foreign policy campaign promises, Carlson noted that direct U.S. involvement in a war with Iran “would be a middle finger in the faces of the millions of voters who cast their ballots in hopes of creating a government that would finally put the United States first.”
“What happens next will define Donald Trump’s presidency,” Carlson concluded. “Drop Israel...let them fight their own wars.”
Former Trump adviser Steven Bannon agrees with keeping the U.S. out of this conflict. "Last night was a decapitation strike against the Iranian Revolutionary Guard,” Bannon said. “And hey, you’re putting your defense first and that’s fine. But we gotta put our defense first. And what cannot happen is be drawn into another war."
These MAGA figures are unified in believing the U.S. should not be involved in a war between Israel and Iran, as the old guard, neoconservative voices like Sen. Lindsey Graham and talk host Mark Levin could not contain their excitement over the Israeli strikes. Graham started out with “game on” in a social media post and then it went downhill from here.
Breaking Points’ Saagar Enjeti said Israel made Trump look like a joke. “Israel has now made a mockery of the United States,” he wrote. “President Trump today said he did not want strikes ahead of negotiations scheduled for tomorrow and they did it anyways.”
“Their attack today is deliberate sabotage and a blatant attempt to force us into war. We must resist,” Enjeti added.
Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk said Israel can do what it likes with Iran, but that it was imperative that the U.S. not be involved, and also to ignore neocon voices urging another American war.
Kirk wrote in a lengthy post on X, “In the hours and days to come, there will be hawks who urge America to increase its involvement in this conflict. They will call for us to ‘finish off the mullahs,’ or to help Israel with ‘mopping up.’ They will claim (tell me if you've heard this before) that if we topple the Iranian regime, we will be welcomed as ‘liberators.’ We should be deeply skeptical of these arguments.”
“Our focus must not be on seeking regime change or any further escalation of America's involvement,” Kirk said. “The last thing America needs right now is a new war. Our number one desire must be peace, as quickly as possible.”
MAGA-adjacent libertarian comedian Dave Smith observed, “I thought Covid was the test of Trump’s life but it’s this. I really hope he doesn’t fail both of them and keeps us out of a war here.”
Sen. Rand Paul wrote, “No war with Iran. The Neocons latest plan must be opposed.”
Paul also used positive messaging, “I applaud POTUS for urging Iran back to the negotiating table and making clear the U.S. won’t be involved in Israel’s strike on Iran.”
“Diplomacy and deterrence, not endless war, should be our priority,” Paul said. “That’s what putting America First looks like.”
Rep. Thomas Massie, regular Paul ally and sometimes Trump foe, but still loved by large swaths of MAGA,, shared on X, “Israel doesn’t need US taxpayers’ money for defense if it already has enough to start offensive wars.”
“I vote not to fund this war of aggression,” Massie added.
One of the most vocal antiwar Republicans in Washington, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, kept it simple, “I’m praying for peace. Peace. That’s my official position.”
Peace is clearly MAGA’s position judging by these reactions. Whether it will have a “peace president” to make that happen remains to be seen.
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