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Nuance doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker, especially when it comes to U.S. foreign policy. After 9/11, Americans watched as the Bush administration drew stark moral lines: countries were either with them or against them. That binary extended to domestic dissent, where questioning military action too often was caricatured as sympathizing with the enemy.

Today, people face similarly high-stakes decisions—especially regarding Israel and Iran—but the debate still struggles to accommodate complexity.

Nuance doesn’t fit on a bumper sticker, especially when it comes to U.S. foreign policy. After 9/11, Americans watched as the Bush administration drew stark moral lines: countries were either with them or against them. That binary extended to domestic dissent, where questioning military action too often was caricatured as sympathizing with the enemy.

Today, people face similarly high-stakes decisions—especially regarding Israel and Iran—but the debate still struggles to accommodate complexity.

Much of the opposition to Israel’s latest attacks on Iran tends to emanate from the extremes—the isolationist far right and the anti-imperialist far left. Both sides can be sharply anti-Israel and at times antisemitic. But there is a more nuanced critique that suggests the assault was premature and perhaps strategically unwise, given the diplomatic moves that were underway and in reserve up until last week.

As a practical matter, it’s not difficult to understand why Israel went ahead with the operation—which has been on the table for more than a decade. Former U.S. President Barack Obama’s 2015 deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, kept Iran’s nuclear program in a tightly controlled box. Once President Donald Trump exited the agreement in 2018, a catastrophic blunder, Tehran brought online more........

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