Good morning. It was a late night for reporters covering yesterday’s elections, and we still don’t know who won the governor’s primary in California. You can catch up on the results here. There’s more news below, including the results of our reader poll about the greatest living American songwriters. But I’m going to start today in the Middle East.
Painted into a cornerWhen the United States and Israel opened their war with Iran earlier this year — and days later Israel resumed its simmering fight with Hezbollah — both nations had high hopes that their military superiority would quickly vanquish their adversaries. It hasn’t worked out that way. Within days of the war’s start, Iran’s military took control of the Strait of Hormuz, a vital passageway for at least a fifth of the world’s oil. Energy prices soared. And President Trump found himself in a jam. “Three months later,” my colleague Michael Crowley reported yesterday, “Iran’s control of the strait has become its most powerful weapon, a source of huge leverage in negotiations with Mr. Trump over the country’s nuclear program.” The Israeli military is backed into a corner as well. Harassed by Hezbollah drones, it finds itself caught between domestic pressure to continue to pummel its foe in Lebanon and Trump’s pressure to ease up while he negotiates with Iran. It is now in what David Halbfinger, who runs our Jerusalem bureau, reports is “a kind of deadlock in which Hezbollah suddenly looks more capable than it did when the war began and the soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces can look startlingly helpless.” (Here’s his story.)
In IranPlenty of people in Washington suspected that Iran would assert control over the strait should the United States attack. War games conducted in the Pentagon over the years came to that conclusion. “Every single time, the first thing we focused on was the strait — without exception,” a national security official in the Obama White House told Michael. “We assumed that if you go to war with Iran, this was their counterpoint.” Trump did not make that assumption, it seems. The White House has not disclosed its initial plans for the war, but Michael discovered some possibilities:
In LebanonAttack drones have bedeviled Israel as well. Hezbollah has used them to hunt down Israeli soldiers and commanders in both Lebanon and Israel. The drones transmit chilling videos of often-lethal strikes that Hezbollah posts on social media. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is up for re-election in a few months. His strategy has been to push Hezbollah further from the border, so that its antitank missiles can’t target the tens of thousands of civilians who live in northern Israel. Hezbollah drones make that harder. So do Trump’s attempts to rein in Israel in search of a deal with Iran. Here’s David on Netanyahu’s plight: Campaigning on his national-security record could be fraught when thousands of residents of northern Israel — including many of his traditional supporters — are either still running to shelters or have yet to return to their homes from wherever they evacuated to, said Michael Koplow, an analyst at the Israel Policy Forum, a research group based in New York. “It’s not really a strategy,” he said of the military’s current posture in Lebanon. “It’s a political imperative in search of a strategy.” Now, let’s see what else is happening.
In California, primary ballots are in. But the state has often been slow to count votes, and it may be days before we know the winners. The nonpartisan governor’s primary included dozens of candidates. The top two will compete in November. Polling suggested that three have a real shot: the Democrats Xavier Becerra and Tom Steyer, and the Republican Steve Hilton. In the Los Angeles mayor’s race, it’s still unclear if the Democratic incumbent, Karen Bass, will face Spencer Pratt, a Republican reality TV star, or Nithya Raman, a Democratic member of the City Council, in November. Here are other results from around the country:
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