Iran Launches Ballistic Missile Attack at Israel

Happy Wednesday. On the debate stage on Tuesday, Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz name-checked Bernie Sanders, Dick Cheney, and Taylor Swift in the same sentence—and it wasn’t the set-up to a joke about the three of them walking into a bar. 

Though if you know the punchline to that joke, we’d like to hear it. 

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• Iran on Tuesday launched some 180 ballistic missiles at Israel in what Tehran said was a retaliatory attack for the alleged Israeli strikes against the leaders of its terrorist proxies, including Hassan Nasrallah of Hezbollah and Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas. Israeli and U.S. officials said both countries’ forces worked in conjunction to shoot down the majority of the missiles, though some still hit targets in central and southern Israel. At least one Palestinian in the West Bank was killed and two Israelis, including a soldier, were injured in the attack. “Iran made a big mistake tonight, and it will pay for it,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, signaling a retaliation was coming. U.S. President Joe Biden said the U.S. was “fully behind” Israel. 
• Two armed terrorists killed seven people and injured at least a dozen more in a shooting and stabbing attack on a light rail train in Tel Aviv on Tuesday evening local time, just before the Iranian missile attack on Israel. The perpetrators were both killed at the scene by police and nearby citizens carrying personal firearms. Law enforcement declared the shooting a terrorist attack, but no group has come forward yet to claim responsibility. The attackers were both identified as residents of Hebron, a city in the West Bank. 
• Tens of thousands of U.S. dock workers walked off the job on Tuesday as part of a strike by the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA). The union called out its members after it failed to reach an agreement with port operators over increased wages and protection against automation. The longshoremen’s current contract expired on Monday. Hundreds of thousands of unloaded shipping containers are already beginning to stack up at ports. “I will cripple you,” ILA President Harold Daggot said last month of the potential economic damage from the strike. President Joe Biden voiced support for the wage increases and said that for now, he wouldn’t use his authority under the Taft-Hartley Act to intervene or even stop the strike. 
• California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday signed into law a ban on legacy admissions—taking into consideration an applicant’s relationship to alumni or donors—at all public and private colleges and universities in the state. “In California, everyone should be able to get ahead through merit, skill, and hard work,” Newsom said in a statement. The ban will take effect in September 2025.  
• The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Monday grounded SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, pending further investigation. The decision comes after the second booster stage of the rocket malfunctioned during the successful delivery of two astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) on Saturday. The FAA’s grounding order is the third in three months for the Falcon 9, which had previously been grounded only rarely. Many Western space agencies rely on the Falcon 9 to access space and the ISS.
• German authorities said Tuesday that they had arrested a 38-year-old Chinese woman living in the country for allegedly giving Chinese intelligence services information on German weapons exports. The woman, identified as Yaqi X, worked at the Leipzig/Halle Airport and is accused of passing information about “flights, freight and passengers” related to arms exports to Chinese intelligence services, as well as about employees of a German arms manufacturer. Other recent incidents involving alleged Chinese espionage have included the arrest of German citizens for giving naval data to Chinese spy services, and the arrest of the parliamentary assistant of a far-right lawmaker, believed to be an employee of the Chinese secret service.
• Former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte officially became the secretary general of NATO on Tuesday. Dubbed the “Trump Whisperer” for his ability to alleviate former President Donald Trump’s concerns about European defense spending in 2o18, Rutte will have to build a relationship with the winner of the U.S. presidential election in November, as well as continue his role as a leader in uniting Europeans behind sending aid to Ukraine. He replaces former Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, who’s served as secretary general of the 32-country alliance for a decade and whose term was extended several times. 
• Claudia Sheinbaum took office on Tuesday as the first female president of Mexico. Sheinbaum, the former mayor of Mexico City and close ally of outgoing President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), won a landslide victory in the country’s June election as the new standard bearer of the ruling Morena party. Her inauguration follows AMLO’s lame-duck overhaul of the judicial system, further entrenching Morena’s governing power. 
• Pete Rose, who set the all-time MLB record for hits, died Monday at age 83. Rose, who spent most of his career with the Cincinnati Reds, was widely considered one of the greatest to ever play the game. But he was permanently banned from the sport in 1989 for betting on baseball games while managing the Reds. 
• The publicist for actor John Amos announced on Tuesday that Amos died on August 21 at the age of 84. It was not clear why the announcement of his death was delayed. Amos had leading roles in Roots and Good Times—the first television show to depict a two-parent black family. 

‘Whoever Attacks Us, We Will Attack Him’

Just before 8 p.m. local time in Israel Tuesday, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) announced that an Iranian attack was underway. 

Shocking footage—some of which was broadcast live on U.S. cable television—showed a stream of what the IDF has since said were 180 ballistic missiles raining down across Israel as the country’s Arrow 2 and 3 defense systems attempted to engage to intercept them.  

Exactly what comes next is an open question. Israeli officials have said a forceful response is imminent and the United States has signaled its support for a strong Israeli counterattack, in contrast to its push for Israel to “take the win” after Iran’s largely thwarted aerial attack in April. But what form that response might take and whether the U.S. will intervene directly on its ally’s behalf remain unclear. 

As millions of Israelis took cover in bomb shelters on Tuesday evening, the U.S. and Israel were working together to shoot down the multiple waves of incoming missiles. Defense Department spokesman Lt. Gen. Pat Ryder told reporters on Tuesday that two U.S. Navy destroyers—the USS Cole and the USS Bulkeley, positioned in the eastern Mediterranean—fired a dozen interceptors at Iranian missiles. IDF spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said the IDF “made quite a few interceptions,” but that there were a “small number of hits” concentrated in the central and southern areas of the country—including severe damage at an elementary school. U.S National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters at the White House on Tuesday that the Iranian attack “appears to have been defeated and ineffective.” 

At least one Palestinian in the West Bank was killed and two Israelis, including a soldier, were injured in the attack. 

The Iranian attack followed Israel’s successful campaign in Lebanon to degrade Tehran’s most important proxy, Hezbollah, in recent weeks. Beginning with an alleged Israeli operation that detonated thousands of Hezbollah pagers on September 17, Israel has systematically dismantled the terrorist group’s leadership and offensive capabilities in a series of military and covert actions, including an airstrike on Friday in Beirut that killed longtime Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. On Monday, Israel formally announced it had conducted limited incursions into southern Lebanon, just weeks after it added securing northern Israel—from which tens of thousands of Israelis have fled in the last year amid fears of an October 7-style attack by Hezbollah—to its explicit war aims. 

Iranian officials claimed Tuesday’s strike was in retaliation for Nasrallah’s killing, as well as the alleged Israeli assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in August—though Israel has never claimed responsibility for the latter attack. 

In April, when Iran last fired directly on Israel, it launched more than 300 missiles and drones in a dramatic if ultimately toothless attack as a response to the killing of an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander in Syria. Tuesday’s volley used exclusively ballistic missiles—which are faster and much harder to shoot down than drones—and included more of them than the April attack, seemingly in an effort to overwhelm Israeli air defenses. 

Several days after the April attack, Israel retaliated with a pinpoint strike inside Iran that seemed carefully calibrated to showcase its abilities while shutting down an escalatory spiral. The U.S. had urged against responding forcefully to the Iranian attack, with President Joe Biden telling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the time that he should “take the win.” 

The tenor of the public U.S. response on Tuesday has been different. Sullivan called the Iranian attack “a significant escalation” and said the U.S. will work with Israel to make sure Iran suffers “severe consequences.” And Biden didn’t qualify his support for some kind of Israeli response. “Make no mistake,” he told reporters Tuesday, “the United States is fully, fully, fully supportive of Israel.”

Now, the question becomes what that Israeli response will be—and what role the U.S. will play in it. Netanyahu said in a Hebrew address on Tuesday evening that Israel will launch a counterattack. “Iran made a big mistake tonight, and it will pay for it,” he said.
“We will stand by the rule we established: whoever attacks us, we will attack him.” 

The sort of minimalist counterstrike of April seems unlikely at this point. “I think [Israel] will hit Iran hard,” former National Security Adviser John Bolton told TMD, “from their oil infrastructure to IRGC bases and assets, possibly up to the nuclear program.” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said this summer that Iran’s breakout time—the time needed to produce a sufficient volume of weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear bomb—is somewhere between one and two weeks. 

“Israel is on the move, and the axis of evil is retreating,” Netanyahu said Tuesday. “We will do everything necessary to continue this trend, to achieve all the goals of the war, primarily the return of all our hostages, and to ensure our existence and our future.”   

Civil Discourse? 

If you had told us at 8:59 p.m. ET on Tuesday that the vice presidential debate between Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Republican Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio would be remarkably cordial, full of fairly detailed policy discussions, and would begin and end with hearty handshakes, we would have laughed at you.

But that’s exactly what we got, with the two candidates—including one who arguably got the veep nod by going viral calling the other one “weird”—falling over themselves to agree with each other. “I think that Gov. Walz and I actually probably agree that we need to do better on this,” Vance said of the problem of gun violence. 

“Well I’ve enjoyed tonight’s debate and I think there was a lot of commonality here,” Walz said toward the end of the debate before launching into a response to Vance on, of all things, the January 6 Capitol riots. He added that he’s sensitive to inadvertent misspeaking, to which Vance interjected, “Me too, man.” Indeed, some of the pair’s exchanges were almost complimentary. 

The night revealed a different side of the two candidates hoping to be just a heartbeat away from the presidency: Vance sidestepped, to a point, some of the controversial statements that have seemed to turn him into a liability for the Republican campaign, while Walz—generally considered an able surrogate for his running mate—floundered at times. But, it’s unclear whether either man’s performance will alter the fundamentals of what is the tightest presidential contest in modern history. 

In what at first appeared to be a ploy to lower expectations for Walz, Democrats spent the days leading up to the debate telling reporters how nervous the governor was. “He’s a strong person,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota told CNN. “He’s just not a lawyer-debater type. It’s not like he was dreaming of debates when he was in first grade.”

It wasn’t just expectation-setting. Walz—who hasn’t done many interviews since he became the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee—did indeed look nervous during much of the debate, totally flubbing a predictable question about where he was during the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre: He’s repeatedly said he was in Hong Kong during the protests in China, but reporting this week revealed he wasn’t there at the time of the protests. 

When asked about it point blank, he gave a meandering, halting, fairly nonsensical answer about his bio, at one point saying he was “proud” of his service … as a kid who rode his bike in his small town in Nebraska. Only at the end of the monologue, when he was asked yet again how he could explain the discrepancy did he say plainly, “I got there that summer and misspoke on this.”

Vance, who spent the last several weeks promoting lies about Haitian immigrants in his own state, looked relaxed as he delivered detailed policy responses. So disarming was his newly normal persona that Walz seemed at a loss for how to attack him, trying instead to highlight the differences between Vance and Trump. “Sen. Vance has said that there’s a climate problem in the past,” Walz said on the subject of climate change. “Donald Trump called it a hoax and then joked that these things would make more beachfront property to be able to invest in.” 

The split screen with both of their faces on Tuesday night frequently showed Walz seeming worried, standing in stark contrast to Vance’s cable-news-honed composure. 

Though the debate opened with a question about the Middle East—whether either candidate would be in favor of a preemptive strike on Iran—neither answered the question directly. There were no questions about support for Ukraine, where there are some marked differences between Vance and Walz.

But the night was heavy on domestic policy. A discussion of abortion—a subject usually treated with more heat than light—was surprisingly substantial. Though he dodged a question about Minnesota’s abortion regulations that he signed, Walz spoke fairly convincingly about specific women affected by more restrictive abortion laws. It was the same line of attack Harris used to knock Trump decidedly off-balance in the presidential debate last month. 

But Vance responded with neither the evasiness of many recent Republican answers on an issue dividing the party nor with Trump’s beleaguered insistence that overturning Roe was what “everyone wanted.” Instead, he gave an almost shockingly well-considered answer—considering the standard level of discourse around the issue—about a woman he had known growing up who had sought an abortion because she was in an abusive relationship. 

Vance said he understood her choice and that he “knew a lot of young women growing up who were pregnant, and had to terminate their pregnancies, and didn’t feel like they had any other options.” Republicans, he argued, had to “earn the trust of the American people back on this issue” by being “pro-family in every sense of the word.”  

On the subject of gun violence—another issue that Democrats and Republicans have often failed to discuss constructively, to say the least—Walz and Vance also had surprising points of agreement. Vance argued that the “epidemic” of gun violence needed to be addressed by cracking down on illegal firearms and increasing security in schools. Walz opposed making schools “look like a fort” but said he was uninterested in “taking your guns away.”

But one moment during the exchange over guns encapsulated the frankly incredible civility of Tuesday’s debate. When Walz spoke about how his 17-year-old son had witnessed a shooting at a volleyball game, Vance made a point to express his sympathy. “Christ have mercy,” he said. It was a human moment that recalled debates—mostly from before most Morning Dispatchers were old enough to watch them—between candidates who seemed committed to basic civility. 

Trump still does not share that same commitment, if his commentary on the debate from his Truth Social account is anything to go by. After a Walz flub when discussing his meeting with Sandy Hook parents—“I became friends with school shooters,” he said—Trump weighed in. “Did Tampon Tim just say he has ‘become friends with school shooters?’” he truthed. “He isn’t even qualified to be Governor, let alone Vice President. Walz and Kamala DO NOT HAVE WHAT IT TAKES!” 

Trump’s overall verdict?: “JD crushed it! Walz was a Low IQ Disaster – Very much like Kamala. Our Country would never be able to recover from an Administration of these two.”

Trump was also the source of the biggest point of disagreement on the stage last night. When asked about Vance’s stated position against certifying the 2020 election results, the senator obfuscated on Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of that election. “My own belief is that we should fight about those issues, debate those issues peacefully in the public square,” Vance said. “And that’s all I’ve said, and that’s all that Donald Trump has said.”  

The answer was a toned-down version of Vance’s previous justification—articulated to New York Times columnist Ross Douthat this summer—for Trump’s actions leading up to and after January 6. Indeed, in Vance’s telling, sowing distrust in elections is as American as apple pie. “I think that challenging elections and questioning the legitimacy of elections is actually part of the democratic process,” he told Douthat. 

Walz drew the sharpest, though still cordial, contrast with Vance on January 6, describing their understanding of events as “miles apart,” even after thanking the senator for discussing the issue. “To deny what happened on January 6, the first time in American history that a president or anyone tried to overturn a fair election and the peaceful transfer of power, and here we are four years later in the same boat,” Walz said. “This has got to stop.” 

Vance tried to counter by deflecting to Democrats claims that Russia influenced the results of the 2016 election by buying “like $500,000 in Facebook ads.” 

Walz wasn’t having it. “January 6 was not Facebook ads,” he said, in one of his strongest moments of the night. The governor then directly asked Vance that question that has dogged so many of the former president’s allies: “Did [Trump] lose the 2020 election?” 

“Tim, I’m focused on the future,” Vance replied before trying to pivot to a point about government censorship. 

Even on a night full of agreement, the hand of friendship didn’t extend quite that far. “That is a damning non-answer,” Walz said.

Worth Your Time

• Writing for The Atlantic, Rose Horowitch explored a peculiar problem now facing some humanities professors at elite universities: students unprepared to read books. “Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998,” Horowitch wrote. “Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. … This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover. ‘My jaw dropped,’ Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.”

Presented Without Comment

New York City Mayor Eric Adams: “I’m not going to resign. I’m going to reign.” 

In the Zeitgeist

Last month, James Earl Jones passed away. Yesterday we learned John Amos, his scene partner in Coming to America, also died in August at the age of 84. 

Toeing the Company Line

• In a special, post-debate edition of Dispatch Live (🔒) Mike was joined by Sarah, Kevin, Steve, Jonah, and Alex to discuss Walz and Vance’s performances. Members who missed the conversation can catch a rerun—either video or audio-only—by clicking here. 
• In the newsletters: The Dispatch Politics crew—and friends!—previewed the vice presidential debate and Nick argued (🔒) Trump’s campaign is the most demagogic in American history.  
• On the podcasts: Jonah is joined on The Remnant by George Weigel, a distinguished senior fellow at the Ethics and Policy Center, to talk all things Vatican City. 
• On the site: Aaron Garth Smith and Jude Schwalbach argue that public schools need to innovate, Kevin weighs in on the longshoremen’s strike, and Jonah tries to explain the logic behind Trump’s increasingly awful rhetoric.

Let Us Know

Did you watch the debate last night? If you did, did anything you saw surprise you?