Who Restarted the Fire?

While Israel’s continued action in southern Lebanon was allegedly jeopardising the conclusion of a deal between Washing­ton and Tehran, Iran \would always be the centrepiece if full-scale war were to resume. The downing of an Apache helicopter that ended the lull as the US retaliated, with Donald Trump promis­ing escalation, was the sort of incident expected to reignite an exchange of strikes. The IRGC would target US bases around the Gulf and the US would hit Iranian militaryinfrastructure. Before June 10, the rupture in the Trump-Netanyahu relation-shipwastheunfoldingdebate, the US president having called the Israeli prime min­ister “crazy” in an expletive-laden phone call.

Even if they were on a collision course, whether Bibi was feeling increasingly isolated or not as Trump looked desperate for a settlement, the focus has returned to the Strait of Hormuz. As oil prices begin climbing again, the situation looks set to become what veteran journalist Jeremy Bowen calls “a long, at­tritional permacrisis that will lurch in and out of outright conflict.” Trump’s problem is that no matter how often and how loudly he claims that Iran has been “completely defeated”, every drone the IRGC can still launch belies that claim. A bigger problem remains the IAEA’s failure to get an honest answer from Tehran on its uranium stockpile and production facilities.

The Historian of Early America

What’s the tragic irony in a pioneering American historian dying at 92 after being struck by a car just a month short of the 250th anniversary of American In­dependence? Gordon S Wood, professor emeritus at Brown University, was a historian’s historian whose works on ear­ly America set the standard for more modern interpreta­tions. Wood’s The Creation of the American Republic, 1776- 1787 won the Bancroft prize in 1970. He won a Pulitzer in 1993 with The Radicalism of the American Revolution. Wood was the archetype of the tradi­tional historian: scholarly and loyal to facts, not politics or ideology. He claimed a middle ground between the grand narrative of America’s founding and the democratisation of history and historiography since the 1960s, with its more egalitarian emphasis. A later generation would see in him the enemy. But that was more prejudice than propriety. It was Wood who spoke out against the exclusion of women and minorities from American history writing in his day. And yet he was a prominent critic of the New York Times’ 1619 Project. NYT had to amend its contention that preserving slavery was a key determinant of the Revolution. Wood leaves us with his warning about judging historical figures with present-day criteria— what he called the fallacy of “presentism”.

The Boss Archive

The Boss now has a building in his name on the Jersey Shore: the Bruce Springsteen Center for American Music. Before the opening on June 13, Springsteen had already performed with Bon Jovi, Public Enemy, and the rem­nants of the E Street Band in the inaugural festivities. In an interview with the New York Times, he said, “I’m a small link in a big chain.” As Donald Trump’s concert for the America 250 celebra­tions on the Washington Mall fell apart, the show seemed to move to the Boss’ archive, a 30,000-square-foot cultural hub he shares with legends past and present which aspires to be the definitive museum of American music.