Tel Aviv, Israel
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After a week of violence reconfiguring the Middle East, some US goals seem in reach, others perhaps fanciful. But the question of where it all ends echoes the loudest.
US President Donald Trump’s demand that he help select the new supreme leader of Iran provides perhaps the clearest insight yet of how close a conclusion might be. On the surface, it appears wildly fanciful, almost absurd, to think that the 88 senior Iranian clerics charged with replacing the theocrat at the top of an Islamic Republic founded to resist American influence would take their cue from, or heed, the White House. But Trump’s demand, and his rejection of late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba as…