Trending Now
We have updated our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use for Eurasia Group and its affiliates, including GZERO Media, to clarify the types of data we collect, how we collect it, how we use data and with whom we share data. By using our website you consent to our Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy, including the transfer of your personal data to the United States from your country of residence, and our use of cookies described in our Cookie Policy.
popular
Iranian policemen monitor an area near a residential complex that is damaged in Israeli attacks in Tehran, Iran, on June 13, 2025.
Israel bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities Thursday night, causing “significant damage” at the country’s main enrichment plant, killing leading Iranian military figures and nuclear scientists, and sparking fears that the Middle East is on the verge of a wider war.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Friday morning the operation hasn’t ended, with strikes continuing into the afternoon.
The United States denied any involvement in the attacks, even though previous reports have suggested that Israeli Defense Forces couldn’t destroy Tehran’s nuclear facilities without Washington’s help. US President Donald Trump nonetheless used the opportunity to press Iran into making a deal – the US and Iran were supposed to hold talks in Oman on Sunday, but it’s now unclear whether Iranian officials will attend.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei pledged a “harsh” response, but their ability to respond has been hindered by Israeli strikes on Iran’s long-range missile facilities and air defenses. The IDF reported on Friday morning that Iran launched 100 drones into Israel, but there were no reports of significant damage.
The strikes mark a seminal moment for Netanyahu. The Israeli leader has long threatened bombing Iran, as he sees this as the only effective method of preventing Tehran from acquiring a nuclear weapon – he doesn’t believe the US nuclear talks can achieve this. Netanyahu never followed through with this threat when former US President Barack Obama was negotiating a nuclear deal with Tehran a decade ago. This time is different: Netanyahu believes Iran is weak – many of their allies in the Middle East are either severely diminished or in exile – so he took his chance.
The strikes went much further than last year’s exchanges, in which Israel bombed the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria and Iran responded with a volley of 300 drones and missiles at Israel, which inflicted little visible damage.
Israel’s strikes yesterday didn’t come totally out of the blue. US and European officials warned earlier in the week that Israel was preparing a strike. Washington also evacuated nonessential staff from its embassy in Baghdad, as well as family members of military personnel at its Middle East bases, amid concerns about a widening conflict.
Where does it go from here? We asked Eurasia Group’s Middle East expert Firas Maksad to shed some light on a complex and dangerous situation. The conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Q: How will Iran respond, and what can it do now that some of its military capabilities have been damaged?
- Maksad: “It has to respond forcefully, if only to save face with a domestic audience, which is important for regime stability, but also to have leverage if there is any return to negotiations further down the road. However, its ability to reach Israel and effect significant damage is fairly limited. Its other options – including closure of the Straits of Hormuz, impacting oil prices or attacks against American basing facilities or even energy facilities in the GCC – those are all options that can backfire and provide the United States with enough pretext and reason to join the war.”
Q: Who, if anyone, can help Iran respond?
- Maksad: “Iran will naturally look towards its proxy network in the region in pursuit of its forward defense strategy, essentially having Hezbollah, but also the Houthis and the militias in Iraq, to come to its aid in a response. However, [the ability of these groups to respond] has been greatly diminished as a result of the past 18 months or so of war.”
Q: Will Israel attack more?
- Maksad: “The Israelis have said that this is only the beginning, the opening salvo of a long and sustained military campaign. I believe that to be the case. They can, in fact, inflict significant damage against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. However, that will require multiple waves of strikes for days and weeks to come, and so I suspect that this will be with us for quite some time.”
Q: Are there any hopes left for a US-Iran nuclear deal?
- Maksad: “Diplomacy is dead for the foreseeable future. It is very unlikely that the Iranian government will return to the negotiating table without at least having attempted a retaliatory strike first, for the purposes of saving face and gathering leverage. This will require some time, particularly as these Israeli strikes are ongoing, and so it is very unlikely, despite President Trump's call for Iran to come back to diplomacy, that the diplomatic off ramp will be Iran’s preferred path forward for weeks to come.”
We also asked Eurasia Group’s Director of Analysis Marc Gustafson whether the United States could be dragged into a regional war.
- Gustafson: “Trump will try to avoid getting involved. Not just because it is risky for the US military, but also because his campaign promise has been to get the US out of foreign wars. This message resonates with his base. That said, the US could get pulled into the conflict. [For example,] if Iran starts attacking US bases within range of Iran’s short-range missiles, Trump will be under considerable pressure to respond militarily.”
On Saturday, US President Donald Trump activated 2,000 members of the California National Guard to quell protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s deportation efforts in Los Angeles, after small but highly visible demonstrations had popped up across the city in the days prior – with some instances of violence, opportunistic looting, and property damage. California Governor Gavin Newsom disputed that federal intervention was necessary and condemned Trump’s deployment decision as illegal and inflammatory, blaming it for stoking the protests.
Though the protests had largely petered out by then, on Tuesday the president dispatched an additional 2,000-plus National Guard troops and 700 active-duty Marines to the area. Downtown LA had a quiet night on the back of a curfew, but anti-ICE (and, more broadly, anti-Trump) demonstrations have started to spread to other major cities like New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Austin, Dallas, and Atlanta, with more planned in Las Vegas, Minneapolis, San Antonio, and Seattle. Texas Governor Greg Abbot has already called in the National Guard ahead of any potential unrest in his state.
Here are my eight key takeaways:
- Trump’s decision to send federal troops into Los Angeles was extreme. It marked the first time in 60 years that the National Guard had been deployed to a US state without the consent of its governor. The last such instance was in 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson federalized the Alabama Guard in defiance of Governor George Wallace, one of the nation’s leading segregationists, to protect civil rights demonstrators led by Martin Luther King Jr. from violence. Needless to say, federal supremacy over states’ rights is being asserted in a very different context, by a very different president, and in service of a very different goal today.
- It’s legal – for now. Trump’s deployment pushes the envelope politically, but as long as the troops limit their role to protecting federal personnel and facilities while refraining from taking law-enforcement actions (as they reportedly have thus far), it will stay within the bounds of presidential authority. That’s a key legal distinction, as the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act bars active-duty forces from engaging in domestic law enforcement unless the president invokes the 1807 Insurrection Act. That’s a step Trump hasn’t taken (yet at least), suggesting that he still sees as high a bar for it as he did during the George Floyd protests in 2020.
- The door is open to a more radical use of emergency powers. The counterpoint is that Trump referred to the LA protesters as a “violent insurrectionist mob” (he does know a little something about those) and on Tuesday refused to take the invocation of the Insurrection Act off the table. He also warned that any protesters at this weekend’s military parade in Washington, DC – peaceful or not – “will be met with very big force,” and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth hinted at a desire to use military forces on domestic soil more extensively going forward. This pattern suggests that Trump’s threshold for activating emergency powers or using troops against Americans is lower than last time around, when he was repeatedly talked out of extreme steps by institutionalist advisors. I wouldn’t be shocked if the administration invoked the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (aka IEEPA, the same law it used to levy reciprocal tariffs on Liberation Day) to freeze the assets of individual American citizens and organizations it accused of aiding and abetting “foreign invaders” (aka undocumented aliens). Or if it used the Communications Act to pressure internet platforms into throttling protest-related content. These scenarios may sound far-fetched, but so did the unilateral deployment of the National Guard and Marine Corps to Los Angeles less than 200 days into the first year of the Trump presidency. In his second term, Trump has proven willing to push the legal and political limits of executive power, against precedent and despite long odds of success.
- Trump’s LA deployment was designed to score political points, not restore peace. The City of Los Angeles was unaffected by the protests, which were confined to a handful of downtown city blocks. The Los Angeles Police Department had things under control (at least until Trump escalated the situation), and local officials saw no reason to request federal help. In fact, they warned that adding federal troops to the mix would risk heightening tensions and endanger public safety. But Trump wasn’t trying to solve a security problem – he was playing politics.
- Trump is eager to pick public fights over immigration. This is the one issue area where the president has had consistently positive approval ratings, save for a brief dip underwater caused by the administration’s mishandling of the Abrego Garcia case. For Trump, the political upside of doubling down on the migrant crackdown is twofold. First, it shifts attention toward his biggest strength and away from headlines that are more problematic for the administration, such as his failure to secure trade deals, his inability to end the Russia-Ukraine war, and his messy breakup with Elon Musk. Second, it forces Democrats into defending politically unsympathetic targets and positions, much like they did with Abrego Garcia (before the White House overplayed its hand) and Harvard University.
- The optics of the LA protests play straight into Trump’s hands. Images of burning Waymos and protestors flying Mexican flags lend credence to the White House’s false claim that undocumented immigrants are dangerous foreign invaders and their defenders are radical anti-American traitors, allowing the president to discredit opponents of mass deportations as threats to public order and safety. That only a small number of troublemakers were illegal aliens doesn’t matter; Trump is betting (correctly, in my view) those visuals will drive public opinion away from the demonstrators and toward more aggressive deportation policies.
- More deportations are coming. Trump has made measurable progress in curbing illegal border crossings, but so far, deportations have fallen far short of his campaign pledge (and even of deportations during Joe Biden’s last year in office). That’s not surprising; large-scale interior removals are much more politically, economically, and logistically fraught than border enforcement. But according to the Wall Street Journal, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller recently ordered ICE to step up its game, demanding that they stop targeting migrants with criminal records, asylum requests, and court petitions and instead “just go out there and arrest illegal aliens” at their jobs and schools. In other words, snag anyone who looks illegal, no probable cause (let alone warrant) needed. That approach was reportedly what sparked the LA protests last week. The backlash was instrumental to Miller’s goals: by signaling that Trump is making good on his deportation promise, standoffs with law enforcement can make deportations more popular and give Trump the political capital to ramp up more visible and disruptive workplace and neighborhood raids, particularly in Democratic-run cities. These operations will trigger more protests, which will in turn be met with more repression and stepped-up enforcement, and so on.
- On immigration, don’t bet on TACO. Trump faces fewer internal constraints in implementing his policy agenda on immigration than in any other area. Unless and until it starts dragging on his approval ratings, he is likely to double down: more aggressive raids, more confrontations with Democratic governors and mayors, more troop deployments to quell public protests. Mass deportations will disrupt local life in places like Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Chicago. Backlash to aggressive enforcement tactics, family separations, and mistaken detentions will be the primary source of domestic unrest in the coming months, but Trump won’t back down. This is a fight the White House is happy to fight.
Trump's deployment of troops to Los Angeles was less about taking control of the streets and more about taking control of the narrative. The strategy is confrontational by design, with immigrants and Democrats as foils and civil unrest as a feature, not a bug. This playbook may work politically. But in the long term, the result will be more conflict: between cities and Washington, between red and blue, between civilians and the military, and between competing visions of American identity. The most politically divided and dysfunctional industrialized nation will only become more so.
People light candles outside Santa Fe Foundation hospital, where Colombian Senator Miguel Uribe Turbay of the opposition Democratic Center party was shifted to from another hospital, after he was shot during a campaign event, in Bogota, Colombia, on June 7, 2025.
On Saturday, a Colombian presidential candidate was shot in the head at a rally in the country’s capital, Bogotá. Three days later, a series of bombs went off in and around the third largest city, Cali, leaving at least four dead. The sudden surge of violence has many Colombians wondering if the country is headed back to a darker time.
“It’s a painful memory of where we come from,” says Colombia Risk Analysis director Sergio Guzmán. “Back then, political candidates were falling like flies.”
What was “back then”? In the 1980s and 1990s, Colombia suffered the worst of a decades-long internal conflict that left 220,000 dead, tens of thousands missing, and millions displaced. Initially a fight between Marxist rebels and the government, it rapidly expanded to include powerful drug cartels and right-wing paramilitaries. The violence was especially acute during the 1990 presidential campaign, when three candidates were assassinated, at least one of them by Pablo Escobar’s fearsome Medellín Cartel. In the early 2000s the state regained ground from the guerillas and the cartels, laying the groundwork for a 2016 peace accord with the main guerilla groups.
But amid rising violence generally, the assassination attempt on Senator Miguel Uribe has rattled a country on edge.
“The shooting is the most significant assault on a presidential hopeful in several years,” says Antonio Espinosa Calero, Eurasia Group’s Andean Region Researcher. “It has certainly fueled anxiety about instability and violence ahead of the upcoming election.”
The shooting isn’t the only reason for the country’s collective anxiety. President Gutavo Petro hasn’t been able to keep a lid on the drug cartels, crime is on the rise nationwide, and political violence has spread across nearby countries – like Ecuador and Mexico.
Wasn’t there a peace deal? Yes. Under the 2016 peace accord between the government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC, members of the guerilla group agreed to hand over their weapons to the government, in exchange for amnesty and political participation.
This hasn’t fostered peace? It has not. Instead, the drug cartels – which were not part of the peace deal – have filled the void, along with other guerilla groups that refused the peace. From 2021 to 2024, the number of kidnappings jumped 72%, while the number of extortion cases more than doubled. Cocaine production has reportedly reached record levels. Killings of human rights activists and other social leaders have soared.
Has the president tried anything? Elected in 2022, Petro tried to implement a Total Peace (“Paz Total”) to rid the country of violence. The former guerrilla fighter, Colombia’s first leftist president, tried to reach accords with every major armed group in the country. The plan has failed to bear fruit, as talks with groups like ELN – a dissident rebel group – have repeatedly broken down. The kidnapping of a famous soccer player’s father in 2023 only underscored the sense of chaos.
Politicians’ use of violent rhetoric hasn’t helped the situation, Colombia experts say. Petro is renowned for using provocative language in his social media posts, and he has already hinted at a conspiracy behind the shooting of Uribe.
“The presence of President Petro on social media,” Atlantic Council’s Colombia expert Enrique Millán-Mejía, has contributed to “an environment of political violence.”
Petro’s opponents – Uribe among them – have often responded in kind. The senator himself posted on X in May, “Every day Petro is in power, Colombia bleeds.”
Where does Colombian politics go from here? It’s a boost for the tough-on-crime candidates who seek to replace the term-limited Petro next year. A poll last year found 85% of adults believe the security situation is getting worse, and this assassination attempt will likely increase those numbers.
“The shooting will amplify public demand for change and concerns over safety in Colombia,” says Espinosa Calero, “likely benefiting conservative and tough-on-crime candidates in the lead-up to next year’s general elections.”
On Ian Bremmer’s World In 60 Seconds: Ian breaks down the assassination attempt on Colombia's presidential candidate, the US-China trade talks, and Canada plans to hit NATO's 2% defense target seven years early.
Ian's takeaways:
An assassination attempt on a Colombian presidential candidate highlights that “security continues to be a really serious problem,” as opposition momentum grows amid President Petro’s struggles.
On US-China trade, Ian says, “There is real progress happening,” as factory shutdown threats push both sides toward short-term stability, even if long-term trust remains elusive.
And Canada’s plan to hit NATO’s defense target early? “It’s about Trump,” Ian notes, as Ottawa moves to ease tensions with Washington ahead of 2025.
Members of the California National Guard stand in a line, blocking an entrance to the Federal Building, as demonstrators gather nearby, during protests against immigration sweeps, in Los Angeles, California, USA, on June 9, 2025.
Overnight, hundreds of US Marines began arriving in the city of Los Angeles, where protests, some of them violent, against the Trump Administration’s immigration enforcement have been ongoing since Saturday.
The move marked an escalation by the White House beyond its initial deployment of National Guard troops on Saturday, and it came just hours after California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom sued the Trump administration over that decision, calling it an “unprecedented usurpation of state authority,” and accusing the White House of provoking the protests.
Why are the Marines there? The troops are officially acting on orders to protect federal property rather than to restore order more widely, though US President Donald Trump has suggested they are there to suppress protesters he has labeled “insurrectionists.”
Legal scholars say this rhetoric suggests Trump may be leaving the door open to invoke the Insurrection Act, which authorizes the direct use of the military against US citizens to suppress rebellion.
“The Insurrection Act is still sitting there on the shelf and gives the president enormous power,” Yale Legal Expert Emily Bazelon told Ian Bremmer on the upcoming episode of GZERO World.
It allows the military to go beyond protecting federal property, to potentially breaking up and policing the protests themselves. In an eerie historical echo, the last time a president did this was in 1992, when President George H. W. Bush deployed Marines to quell racially charged riots in Los Angeles that were touched off by the acquittal of police officers in the beating of Rodney King, a Black motorist.
Trump has already tested the legal bounds in LA. When he deployed the National Guard over the objections of Governor Newsom – the first time a president has defied a governor in this way since the 1960s, he invoked Title 10 of the US Code. That’s a law which permits the White House to “federalize” state-based National Guard units if necessary to “execute the laws of the United States,” – in this case immigration enforcement.
California’s lawsuit says that the White House overstepped its authority and that local law enforcement is capable of managing the protests alone.
In the White House vs California standoff there are risks for both sides. On the one hand, Trump has public approval for stricter immigration policy, with a slight majority of Americans, and a robust majority of Republicans, in favor of his policies, according to polls taken before the weekend upheaval.
And with polls showing that only a third of Americans support the LA protests, Trump, who has long styled himself as a “law and order” leader, may also relish the notion of Democrats associating themselves with images of unpopular chaos and disorder on American streets.
But the deployment of federal troops also poses risks – if they are seen harming US citizens there could be a public backlash against an administration that is seen to be overstepping its bounds.
For now, Trump seems keen to push the envelope. “It is 100% true that they’re enforcing immigration laws and that there are lots of people in the country illegally. However, if you were just playing the numbers game, you would go to a poultry factory in the middle of nowhere in the Midwest and pick up a lot of factory workers,” says Bazelon.
“When you choose to go into the heart of a city, onto the streets and publicly snatch people up, you’re kind of asking for a reaction.”
The deployment, which has sparked protests across the city, marks the first such federal action without a governor’s approval since 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson sent troops to Alabama to protect civil rights demonstrators from segregationist Governor George Wallace.
“This is obviously very different kind of politics,” said Ian, “but nonetheless reflecting of where the country… is increasingly oriented—not in becoming more progressive… but instead in securing the border.”
Images of protests featuring Mexican flags, Ian notes, feed a narrative the president is eager to promote.
“If Trump continues to respond in a public and aggressive way, there’s certainly a risk that tensions could escalate,” Ian warned, “especially as deportation operations ramp up in the coming months.”
- Where does Trump’s immigration crackdown stand, nearly 100 days in? ›
- Trump-appointed judge strikes down use of wartime powers to fast-track deportations ›
- What does Trump’s mass deportation mean for Canada — and immigration policy? ›
- Trump’s immigration plan faces hurdles ›
- What We're Watching: Trump calls out National Guard, US-China trade talks, Russia-Ukraine violence escalates ›