Lone raider: Israel bombs Iran

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Rosie Blore. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. The arrival of hurricane season in America always elicits trepidation, and particularly so this year. Not only are some storms becoming fiercer, but the Trump administration is undermining many of the institutions that once monitored or responded to raging weather events. And this weekend, the FIFA Club World cup begins in America. A football tournament that aims to pit the best club sides against each other from all over the world. More football sounds like a good thing, but some question what the contest will really achieve. But first, Rumors had been swirling for days. Last night, the assault began.

Moments ago, Israel launched Operation Radio Rising Lion, a targeted military operation to roll back the Iranian threat to Israel's very survival.

Israeli fighter jets attacked Iran's nuclear facilities and top military commanders. Buildings were set ablaze in Iran's capital, Tehran, and plumes of smoke rose from what appears to be a key nuclear site. Operation Rising lion has plunged the Middle east into further turmoil as Iran retaliated with drone strikes on Israel. The question is what this will mean for an already conflict ridden region and whether America may ultimately be dragged in.

This is a war between two of the biggest powers in the region and it's not just another series of attacks and missile strikes.

Anshul Pfeffer is the Economist Israel correspondent.

This is over 200 fighter jets being launched in waves, flying over 1000 miles to targets in Iran. With the numbers that we've heard so far, around 400 munitions dropped on Iran just in the last few hours, over 100 targets attacked. This is a big war. It's certainly a big air war. And Iran has the capacity, with thousands of ballistic missiles, to strike back both at Israel, at other neighbors in the region, and perhaps also to draw America in by attacking American bases and targets in the region.

So what did Israel actually attack?

As far as we know now, there have been senior commanders in the Iranian army, in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and nuclear scientists who have been killed in these airstrikes. Command centers, air defense batteries, ballistic missile factories, at least one uranium enrichment center that we know of. These have all been hit. The waves of Israeli attacks are ongoing as we speak. There's been, I think by now, seven or eight waves of these attacks. And as the time of recording, about an hour and a half ago, Iran launched a wave of 100 explosive drones towards Israel. And as we speak, they're being intercepted outside of Israel's airspace, mainly above Jordan.

And particular people were attacked here who were the targets?

So the chief of staff of the Iranian army, the chief of the irgc, the chief of Iran's emergency command, those are three very senior officers that we know have been assassinated. That's also been confirmed by the Iranian media. Ali Shamukhani, who is the senior national security advisor to the supreme Leader. Ali Khamenei has also been killed. He had a brief also for overseeing the nuclear program and at least two senior nuclear scientists, as far as we know.

Anshul, we were expecting some kind of attack, but this is a really aggressive assault, isn't it?

I wasn't quite sure what was going to happen. But this isn't the first time that Israel's launched a major campaign with a decapitation move before anything else. This is a tactic of trying to postpone, delay, hamper any type of retaliation by, first of all, taking out the main people who would be directing such a retaliatory attack. We saw it nine months ago in Israel's war against Hezbollah when the significant strikes began. The first were targeting the senior military commanders of Hezbollah and Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hezbollah.

And what has Israel said about why it's done this attack and now?

So the official reason is that Israel had intelligence. This is according to Israeli officials. We haven't been able to verify this, that in recent months Iran has been secretly stepping up its nucle development plan, that it launched a secret program of experiments of all components of a nuclear weapon. And as far as Israel was concerned, this was the point of no return, that if Israel didn't act imminently, then Iran would have reached a point where it would be almost impossible to deny it of that nuclear capability. Netanyahu said that Israel was preventing becoming a victim of a nuclear holocaust. Defense Minister Katz called it a defining moment in the history of the state of Israel, in the history of the Jewish people.

And how has Iran responded?

Well, Iran has responded with very forceful statements that they will punish the Israelis, that the Israelis will suffer a terrible future for what they have done. The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said that Israel had prepared a bitter fate for itself. They've also blamed the American administration, which is interesting because the Americans so far in their statements, which are pretty bland, seem to be distancing themselves. They're not condemning Israel in any way, but they're also kind of making it clear that they're not part of this attack. And this is also confirmed from Israeli officials who are saying this attack was only carried out by Israel. The question is, what other types of assistance was Israel receiving from America? Was it receiving intelligence? Was there any help in facilitating this long range operation, perhaps overflight of other countries coordination? We don't know that at this point. But as far as Iran's official statements go, it's now the war with Israel and America.

And Anshel, you kind of asked my question for me there, but where does the US Fit into this?

So the US has been for the last couple of months has been engaged in a diplomatic process with Iranians towards reaching some kind of nuclear agreement. The last couple of weeks we've heard from Donald Trump that things weren't going so well, but it was still happening. There was supposed to be this weekend another round of talks. Whether Donald Trump and his team are angry at Israel for carrying out this strike, we haven't yet had any indication at that. But it did seem at least that the Americans were still hoping for a deal. And I think from Israeli officials I've spoken to, the fear in Israel amongst Israeli leaders was that perhaps Trump, in his eagerness to reach a deal, would reach something which would be far less than perfect or even good for Israel, that would allow the Iranians to continue some forms of nuclear development. And I think that Israel has preempted not just Iran's plans, is also preempting America's diplomacy.

And Ansho, where does this leave the region?

Well, the region is sort of watching and not quite sure what to make of this. So far, this is only Israel and Iran. But Iran could retaliate not just against Israel, it could retaliate against America's allies in the region, Iran's neighbors. But it's not clear at this point what kind of a spillover there will be. And it remains to be seen over which countries the Israeli fighter jets flew to attack Iran. Iran mayhop hold those countries responsible as well. So we're very much at the point where everybody's waiting to see how Iran will retaliate and will this suck other countries into this war?

So how effective will this strike have been?

There's been different assessments of how far back can Israel push the Iranian nuclear program of a year or two years. And many Israeli officials I've spoken to over the years about this kind of attack say, yes, we may have to do it again. But at this point, Netanyahu and his government seem to have felt, and from what I hear, most of the security establishment agrees with them, that Iran needed being pushed back. At this point, Israel's obviously hoping this has eliminated the nuclear threat from Iran, but there's also the possibility that Iran may now break out of the non proliferation treaty and go all for a bomb in whatever facilities it still has at its disposal.

Anshal, thank you very much for talking to me.

Thank you for having me, Rosie.

Tomorrow on the Weekend Intelligence, we delve into a military mission of a different kind. Two weeks ago, Ukraine launched its most audacious attack yet on Russian soil, blowing up dozens of fighter jets using drones hidden in wooden cabins and ferried to their destination using ordinary lorries. Operation Spiderweb, as it was known, involved 18 months of meticulous planning. In complete secrecy, we bring you the story of the spycraft behind Spiderweb. It's a subscriber only show. Better get to it if you aren't one already. Economist podcast plus is your mission.

In the bayou towns of southern Louisiana, living through hurricanes is almost a way of life.

Rebecca Jackson is our southern correspondent.

In Florida, people feel pride in being resilient to hurricanes. There's this macho sense of hunkering down and living through storms year after year after year. In many states on America's southern coast, people's lives are punctuated by big storms. But last year, in late September, things changed.

Hurricane Helene hit Florida, then carved a.

500 mile path of destruction north, killing.

More than 240 people. After making landfall in Florida, the storm traveled inland, hundreds of miles inland. The rain went through Georgia and up into North Carolina, where flooding began to fill the crevices and valleys of western North Carolina's mountain towns, the worst flooding ever on record for this date. More than 100 people are dead from Helene, a number that's still expected to rise. Hundreds more are missing, and roughly 2.1 million customers are without power. Across the region, houses were ripped from their roots and people were swept away. These Blue Ridge mountain towns were places full of climate expats, places that people went to escape bad weather in Tampa or New Orleans and get reprieve in the mountains. This year, as a new hurricane season begins, people in the American south have a renewed sense of panic. Helene taught us that many of the places that we thought were immune to extreme weather, to the biggest storms, no longer are.

And now I'm joined in the studio by Oliver Morton, one of our senior editors, and Rachel Dobbs, our environment editor. Rachel, what can we expect from this hurricane season?

So the national oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts that there will be above average activity this hurricane season, and they think kind of within that. That's about 13 to 19 named storms, of which six to 10 are probably hurricanes, and three to five of those are major hurricanes. That doesn't necessarily mean that all of those are going to come about. Last season was predicted to be the worst season in history, and it wasn't, although it was quite bad. It was the third costliest, and it did also have Hurricane Helene, which was the deadliest hurricane in America since Maria in 2017.

Ollie, it's sort of received wisdom at this point that hurricanes are getting more extreme and more destructive. Is that the case?

There's certainly evidence that the strongest hurricanes are getting somewhat stronger. The number of hurricanes doesn't necessarily seem to be changing in the North Atlantic basin. And the other big changes you're seeing are that hurricanes are both getting intense more quickly, it would appear, which would more or less make sense, given the science. And also they are sticking around places rather longer. So they're faster to get big but slower to move on. And that means that they can do an awful lot of raining.

How much of this is about climate change?

So this is actually quite a tricky question to answer. Seasonal changes and big changes to sort of global weather patterns like El Nino and La Nina play a huge part in hurricane formation. And the link between individual storms and climate change is not that well understood yet. But climate change does seem to be driving up part of the problem. It's starting to change how storms behave. And a lot of how hurricanes form and how they act is based on the temperatures of the ocean, because they then move across them. And ocean temperatures are becoming higher and higher under climate change. Sea temperatures worldwide last year were record breaking, and that looks kind of set to continue. And actually, precipitation depends on the amount of moisture in the atmosphere, and a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, so that plays into it as well.

The other thing is, of course, that although you don't notice it, year on year, sea level is rising and storm surges depend on sea level.

But this isn't just about weather and climate change, is it, Ollie?

No, I mean, it's an important lesson about climate risk is that you have to look at the changing probabilities of things happening, and to some extent, you have to look at the workings of chance as to where they happen, but you also to look at preparedness. And the Trump administration appears to be deliberately reducing America's preparedness. It's a sort of reverse climate adaptation where you make people more vulnerable, not less so. We've seen a reduction of capacity at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, fema, and President Trump has recently said that he actually wants to get rid of FEMA altogether by the end of this year, which probably won't help morale there. We're seeing also reduced capacity at noaa, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Admin, and we've seen reports that useful public communication websites like climate.gov are going to be closed down. We're seeing reduced efforts to actually capture the data that will help track and predict the tracks of hurricanes. And we're seeing a general effort to make America less prepared.

Rachel, how much does that change in American preparedness come down to skepticism about climate change and its role?

It's difficult to say because of the way that the Trump administration approaches climate change, which is obviously based at some level on this idea that climate change is not important. But I think it's more based on this idea that climate change is not something that they should be concerned with. And if you look before this administration came in, the sort of blueprints laid out in stuff like Project 2025 talked about climate services, climate knowledge, there was a really strong push to kind of dismantle these things because they felt as if it was pushing a political agenda that they did not like. So I'm not totally convinced that it is because they fundamentally don't believe hurricanes or extreme weather events are going to get worse, but rather because it is something that they do not feel themselves to be aligned with.

Even if this was just going to be a hurricane season like any other, which is really all we can say at the moment. Maybe a little bit on the heavy side. The idea of taking the mechanisms that you've built up to predict the courses of hurricanes and to help people hit by hurricanes, and you've just dismantled those, seems from outside America, and I'm sure to many people within America, simply insane.

I think it is also with this administration, this idea that sort of central federal government shouldn't be responsible for disaster response in this way. And that's something that should be left to the concern of states. That is something that the administration has said very strongly that they want states to take on more of their own disaster response. It's part of why they are kind of starting to move to dismantle fema. And that kind of approach can cause real problems. And that's actually something that we saw during Hurricane Helene. When you had different counties issuing or not issuing evacuation orders kind of according to their own plans, then you have a real kind of hodgepodge and you don't have a coordinated response. And the upshot of that is that people get stuck and people die when they don't have to.

It's an interesting tension, isn't it, where you say that the feds shouldn't have a role in this sort of thing. But when it comes to who gets to send the National Guard into the streets of la, that's gotta be a federal decision. Cause the states can't be trusted with things like that.

Given that a federal response, a coordinated response, appears unlikely in the foreseeable future, is there anything that coastal communities can do to prepare themselves better?

Coastal communities that are at risk of hurricanes tend to pretty much know what they should do. As our experience in general, I think the problem comes with edge cases of places which, although historically have seen hurricanes, don't perceive themselves as being at risk of hurricanes. And that's why predictions are really, really vital. Because if you get told authoritatively and clearly that a hurricane is coming, you may do something. If you don't get told that, the chances of you doing something are very small. But there is always a role for individual and community and local resilience. And that's obviously something that people may have to rely on more than ever.

Ollie, Rachel, thank you so much.

Thank you, Rosie.

Thanks, Rosie. It's always a pleasure.

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One of the things I love to do while traveling is to take in a local football match.

Vishnu Padmanabhan is an Asia correspondent.

Couple of months ago, I traveled to Jakarta where I saw a match involving Persija Jakarta, the local team of Indonesia's capital. The quality of football wasn't great, but I was struck by the passion the fans had for the local team and also the number of foreigners playing. There were Brazilians and Spaniards on the pitch. This is actually part of a broader trend. The number of foreigners playing club football around the world is increasing. And so while globalization is retreating in some areas of life is thriving in football. And now FIFA, the sports governing body, wants to capitalize on this global passion with the FIFA Club World Cup.

So, Vishnu, for those of us who haven't been following in quite such detail, what is the FIFA Club World cup and how does it fit into that wider football landscape?

You must be familiar with the FIFA World cup, which is the tournament for international teams, which happens every four years. And it's by many measures the biggest sporting event in the world. And so FIFA now wants to replicate that for football clubs. After all, for most football fans, the football they consume for most of the time is club football. So FIFA now want to create a global event where all of these clubs can play every four years to identify the best club in the world. And there used to be a tournament that used to happen annually between the champions of Asia and the champions of Africa, champions of Europe and champions of South America. But that only featured a handful of games. And so this is a much bigger version of that tournament. It features 32 teams with players from 90 countries. So it really is a very, very global event. And it will also take place every four years.

So why is FIFA doing this?

FIFA says it wants to make the game truly global. While football is popular everywhere, it's still a very European sport. Europe is the sport's center of gravity and its importance is only increasing. One of the early matches in the World cup is between Bayern Munich and Auckland City. Bayern Munich are one of the biggest clubs in the world, they are current German champions. 75,000 people watch their home games. Their star forward is Harry Kane, who's also the England captain. By contrast, Auckland City, who are the champions of New Zealand, are essentially an amateur team, and one of their forwards actually has a day job as a project manager. Because European teams are much richer, they can also hoover up any talent that emerges around the world. European football is able to do this because it just has far more revenues, and that allows it to monopolize football talent around the world. And this plays out on the pitch. So in the last 17 Club World Cups, European teams have won 16 of them.

Surely the FIFA Club World cup isn't really going to change that European dominance.

No, it isn't. Actually. Most people don't think it will, given the strength of the European football league system. In fact, for this tournament, the top nine favorites are all European clubs, which is why many fans, especially those in Europe, feel this is just a move by FIFA to grab more money and power within the sport. UEFA, which is the European football governing body, earns more money now every year than FIFA because UEFA runs the Champions League, which is the biggest tournament for clubs in Europe, which gives UEFA a lot of money from broadcast rights and commercial revenues and so on. And so FIFA, I've seen how much money UEFA gets from the club game that wants to replicate this, but presumably.

For a lot of fans, they're just delighted at more football. They don't really care if this redress is a global imbalance.

So that's also an interesting question, because.

A lot of fans feel there is too much football already, especially in Europe. But there is definitely outside Europe, a lot of excitement for this tournament. For South American clubs, beating European clubs has always been a deep craving for them, and they've always been obsessed about becoming world club champions. I think Argentina and Brazil, the local leagues, have actually adjusted the schedules to help their clubs succeed in this tournament. And for the clubs in Asia and Africa, they see it as an opportunity to get exposure and showcase that there is more to football than just European clubs. And I think that is what gives this tournament some chance of succeeding, this excitement outside Europe. And after all, if you look at European football itself, it's dominated by a handful of clubs, but its success depends on the vast pyramid of clubs who keep playing and trying to taste some sort of glory. In the same vein, this FIFA Club World cup will give smaller teams outside Europe a chance of that glory. And I think by this logic, a similar hope could sustain and fuel this club World cup to succeed.

Vishnu, great to talk to you. Thank you so much.

Thanks, Rosie.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. The show's editors are Chris Impey and Jack Gill. Our deputy editor is John Jo Devlin and our sound designer is Will Rowe. Our senior producer is Sarah Lanyuk and our senior creative producer is William Warren. Our producers are Henrietta McFarlane, Benji Guy and Jonathan Day. With extra production help this week from Emily Elias, we'll all see you back here for the weekend. Intelligence tomorrow.

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