| Here’s a question with no easy answers: Why is Israel waging a war with Iran? Is it because it wants to ... A) stop Tehran and reshape the Middle East
B) save the nuclear nonproliferation regime
C) take on a larger axis of aggressors including North Korea, Russia and China No matter your answer, you’re at least partly correct in Hal Brands’ eyes. “The struggle between Iran and Israel isn’t one war,” he writes. “It is three globally significant wars all at once.” Ever since the 1979 Islamic revolution, Iran has been doing its best to remove Israel from the picture, using a network of proxies — Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen — to humiliate and intimidate Jerusalem, all while expanding its nuclear ambitions. For a time, that strategy worked, but Hal says whatever momentum Iran had gained was lost the moment Israel “awakened to existential peril” and “remade the regional power balance.” Then there’s the nukes: Israel doesn’t want Iran tinkering around with uranium and plutonium any more than the US does. “If Israel can wreck that program or force Tehran to cut a deal under duress, it will slow the spread of nuclear weapons — and even force it, modestly, into reverse,” he writes. In turn, Israel will be sending a strong message to Tehran’s nuclear buddies in North Korea, Russia and China: Your weakest link is wrapped around our finger. “All this underscores why Israel is a valuable ally: It often advances US interests simply by defending its own,” Hal argues. But what happens when those US interests become completely incoherent to even its closest backers? The postwar international order goes belly-up. James Stavridis sees President Donald Trump’s isolated, erratic and divisive foreign policy as a major danger to the world: “Levying big trade penalties on allies, friends, partners and rivals — then peeling back or putting them on hold due to geopolitical situations, internal political pressure or genuine disarray — is causing America’s rivals to try and wait us out, and our friends looking for other options.” What’s the US president been up to while European leaders load up on weapons? Aside from randomly erecting massive flag poles at the White House, Trump is doing what he does best: posting on Truth Social. On Tuesday, John Authers says two words — “UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” — changed the calculus for markets. Instead of worrying about Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz, investors started to question whether the US would begin directly inserting itself in the war. On Wednesday, Trump stayed evasive when reporters asked if he was considering bombing Iran: “I may do it. I may not do it,” he said. “I mean, nobody knows what I’m going to do.” Including, possibly, himself. And that, my friends, is the problem. Mattel has made Barbie do a bunch of questionable things over the years: In 1963, she read a miniature diet book called, “Don’t Eat.” In 1992, she didn’t like math. In 2003, she was pregnant with a plastic fetus. In 2010, she recorded 30 minutes of video on her camera, to the dismay of the FBI. And in 2015, she connected to Wi-Fi and was equipped with more than 8,000 conversations. Given that progression, Mattel’s latest idea — a Barbie powered by OpenAI — isn’t all too surprising. But it’s nonetheless worrying for a parent like Parmy Olson, who has already witnessed the negative effects of AI toys in her own home. “I’m less concerned about what AI playmates can do to imaginative play and data protection than what they’ll do to kids’ social skills, based on my own experience,” she writes. Last year, she purchased Grok (not to be confused with Elon Musk’s Grok, the subject of Dave Lee’s latest column), a plush mechanized toy made by a San Francisco startup. “One of Grok’s most noticeable features was how agreeable it was with my then-seven-year-old daughter,” she writes. “When she told Grok she wanted to play with her Barbie, it replied, ‘That sounds like fun!’ So too were her suggestions to travel to Mars, then go to the beach, and then to play princesses.” Although Mattel has yet to reveal how its AI Barbie will operate, Parmy worries it will be similarly compliant: “Some kids might start to prefer the programmed positivity of their playthings to the rough edges of human playmates. Childhood, after all, represents the years when humans learn how to navigate disagreements.” Rapid-Fire AI Reading: - There’s a case for an AI future that looks less like The Terminator and more like Astro Boy. — Catherine Thorbecke
- New wind and solar projects will depend on the AI industry’s hunger for electricity. — Liam Denning
- Latin America’s data center gold rush comes with some big risks. — Juan Pablo Spinetto
- Nvidia’s “sovereign” AI doesn't look much like sovereignty for European tech. — Lionel Laurent
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