Author: Martin Kramer

He dreamed of regime change

On By Martin Kramer

The Iran war has entered a new phase, a “double-sided ceasefire.” Eventually, we will learn the backstory, and it won’t look like anything we were led to believe while it was unfolding. Much of what seems true today will turn out to be false, and vice versa. If it weren’t always so, the world wouldn’t need historians like me.

In the meantime, I seek insights in the wisdom of mentors now gone. Bernard Lewis was one; I wrote about Lewis and Iran the other week. This time, I’ll consider Uri Lubrani (1926-2018), an Israeli diplomat and defense official.

Lubrani, who served the state from its founding, had the unusual distinction of being posted, time and again, to the epicenters of crisis. From 1967 to 1971, he served as ambassador to Ethiopia, which positioned him to play a crucial role in the emergency emigration of 14,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel in 1991 (Operation Solomon). It was his greatest achievement.

But he was also known for serving as head of the Israeli mission to Iran (with ambassadorial rank) from 1973 to 1978. His claim to fame: he anticipated the rise of religious extremism and the Shah’s fall before anyone else did.

As early as 1975, he warned a U.S. senator visiting Tehran that “the most serious problem that the Shah had domestically was from the religious elements who were hostile and very difficult for him to deal with.” The U.S. diplomat who accompanied the senator later recalled: “I never heard anyone say that in the American embassy. I never heard any journalists say it or any Iranians say it. This was the first time that I heard that analysis.”

Lubrani remained ahead of the curve. In a June 1978 dispatch, he reported to Jerusalem that the Shah’s position was undergoing an “accelerated process of destabilization… a process from which there is no return and which will ultimately lead to his downfall and a drastic change in the form of government in Iran.” Again, he was alone. The State Department at the time estimated that the Shah had “an excellent chance to rule for a dozen or more years,” and the CIA held that “Iran is not in a revolutionary or even a pre-revolutionary situation.” Lubrani emerged from the Iranian revolution as an acclaimed oracle.

I got to know him in the mid-1980s, when he ran an office for Lebanese affairs at the defense ministry. Israel was occupying much of South Lebanon and rubbing up against Hezbollah, Iran’s Shi‘ite proxy. I was beginning to work on Hezbollah myself, and we had much to discuss. Lubrani was also an old friend of Lewis, and I often found myself at dinner with both of them. I wish I’d taken notes.

“We have to try”

Lubrani was renowned for his persistent assertion that regime change in Iran was not only feasible but inevitable. Initially, like Lewis, he hoped a strongman might overthrow the ayatollahs. “I believe that Tehran can be taken over by a relatively small force, determined, ruthless, cruel,” he told the BBC in 1982. “I mean the men who would lead that force would have to be emotionally geared to the possibility that they would have to kill 10,000 people.” (In retrospect, the number seems modest.)

But Iran wasn’t his formal brief, and only after Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000 did Lubrani devote himself almost entirely to the country. Trading on his reputation for feeling the pulse of the Iranian people, he insisted that they would overturn the regime, but that it would happen sooner if they received a boost from the outside. From a small office in the defense ministry, on a minimal budget, he tried to stitch together a network of Iranian dissidents and informants who might one day deliver the goods.

By then, he had passed the formal retirement age, and the political and defense establishment viewed him as a holdover from the distant past. In Washington and Jerusalem, they’d concluded that the regime wouldn’t fall, neither now nor later. Policy focused instead on behavior modification. Lubrani admitted he’d come to be seen as an “alte kaker” (an old fart) who “doesn’t know what he’s talking about… I’ve become the village idiot.” He had a license to whisper to exiled Iranians in hotel lobbies and trawl Washington in pursuit of allies, but not much more.

Yet his faith never flagged because he believed the Islamic Republic was fundamentally alien to the Iranian character. “I believe that there’s a popular basis for a change in Iran,” he said in 2006.

The Iranians do not want to be a nation that has religion forced upon it. It’s true that this is a nation with a profound connection to religion, which incidentally includes antisemitic overtones. But the Iranians do not want religion to be forced on them.

Lubrani put the percentage of Iranians who wanted a change of regime at 80 percent “at least.”

The problem was that Israel’s intelligence agencies weren’t detecting signs of a resistance that could be mobilized. Lubrani replied that he had a “gut feeling,” just as he had in 1978. “On the matter of Iran, with all possible humility, I haven’t been wrong…. My feeling is that there is a green movement. It’s mature. It’s ripe. It ought to be helped. And it’s going to do the job.” As for intelligence, he acknowledged its absence: “I have no proof. But when they tell me that something is not possible, that I’m a dreamer, I reply that as long as the opposite cannot be proved, we have to try what I’m recommending.”

Just what did he recommend? In the first instance, good old-fashioned Cold War-type Psychological Operations:

What is required is an international effort to topple the regime. Exactly as the United States under the leadership of Ronald Reagan did to topple the Soviet Union and the communist Iron Curtain in Europe…. I am talking about propaganda, about psychological warfare, about financial assistance.

In particular, he wanted to create an anti-regime media outlet on a large scale:

I once dreamed that Israel would be strong enough and wealthy enough to set up an Israeli version of Al Jazeera, without visible Israeli fingerprints. It would cost a great deal [elsewhere, Lubrani put the cost at £50 million a year], but only small change compared with our total defense budget. The hub should not be in Israel, but in London or Cyprus.

Alas, he couldn’t find any takers in the Israeli establishment. “There is no senior official in Israel’s finance ministry who would understand this and approve the budget. They would think Lubrani had lost his mind.” Instead, he had to make do with a modest Persian-language radio station that aired only two hours a day.

Lubrani had another idea, this one for the Americans: “Pay [oil] workers [in Iran], in money and food, to stay home instead of going to work. It would make not going to work worth their while…. The United States has spent a hundred billion dollars on Iraq so far [2006]—and with just a fraction of that sum, the objective could be achieved.” The Americans didn’t bite.

Embed from Getty Images

Doomsday weapon

The one alternative Lubrani ruled out was military action. First, it would kill any chance of a popular uprising: “Any military action will only rally the Iranian people—a proud people with a developed national consciousness—around the regime.” Second, Iran would acquire a nuclear weapon anyway: “Unfortunately, I estimate that Iran will eventually reach nuclear weapons. Even if you bomb them, you will postpone the end by a few years until they once again achieve the capability.”

Lubrani regarded military action as “a doomsday weapon. Only if all ends have been exhausted…. I do not accept the talk as though there is only a military option in order to prevent Iran from getting the bomb.” At a 2010 conference of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, “they asked me about the military option. I said I oppose the military option. For me as an Israeli, it should always be on the table. But that’s only for the end of days. When the sword is at my throat, I’ll use it.” (Watch him here calling military action “the very, very last resort for Israel, and I wouldn’t use it.”)

This made Lubrani a dissenter. It wasn’t just that he doubted the efficacy of military action. He thought highly of Iranian persistence and concluded that they would get a nuclear weapon sooner or later anyway. The only way to neutralize the threat was to change the regime itself:

People focus on the danger of Iran obtaining nuclear weapons and argue that everything possible must be done to stop it. In my view, they will get such a weapon whether we like it or not. But the real issue is not the weapon itself, but who has their finger on the trigger. The answer is not one agreement or another, nor destroying the nuclear reactors, but replacing the current regime with a rational one.

This led him to a logical conclusion: “Practically, I’m much more concerned about regime change than about the nuclear matter. I’m absolutely convinced that the nuclear matter will resolve itself once there is a regime change.”

Unlimited patience

Years turned into decades, and Lubrani eventually became Israel’s oldest civil servant. In 2009, the press reported that his office was slated for closure. Lubrani received a reprieve when the Green Movement filled the streets of Tehran the following month. In 2015, he retired at 89 and died less than three years later. No representative of the Netanyahu government attended the funeral. “A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country” (Matthew 13:57).

In the rare instances when Lubrani’s name comes up today, it’s often as a synonym for Don Quixote. Yet Lubrani posed the key questions the present war must answer. It’s not whether to resort to military force: that train has left the station. Would Lubrani have approved? Who knows? Iran’s nuclear program wasn’t as advanced in his day, and its ballistic missile program wasn’t even on his radar. Perhaps he would have thought that “doomsday” had arrived, though he wouldn’t have taken any politician’s word for it.

Lubrani challenged conventional wisdom in a more profound way. He argued that any military campaign would only delay the regime’s nuclear program; that no negotiated agreement would permanently block its path to nuclear weapons; that “a rogue regime” combined with nuclear weapons was a “lethal” combination; that only regime change could neutralize the threat; and that the Iranian people could overturn that regime, provided the United States and Israel had their backs.

Has Lubrani’s premise finally taken hold in Israel? Last spring, Mark Dubowitz, CEO of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, flagged “a sea change with respect to how Israel sees the Iran issue today. And I think for the first time ever in Israeli history, they’ve made maximum support for the Iranian people a central pillar of their strategy. And it’s not just rhetorical.” Just the other day, Mossad chief David Barnea doubled down: “Our commitment will only be complete once this extremist regime is replaced. This regime that seeks our destruction must pass from this world. This is our mission.”

That will take substantial resources, political finesse, cultural understanding, and steady resolve. Above all, it will require a virtue that’s in short supply. “The Iranians have a quality that we and others lack,” Lubrani once said. “Patience. Unlimited patience.” Whether Israel has it will determine whether this war is remembered as a turning point or a prelude to another round.

Header image: Uri Lubrani, 1991. Dan Hadani Collection, The Pritzker Family National Photography Collection, National Library of Israel. CC BY 4.0.


Uri Lubrani (left) and Bernard Lewis at a conference in Jerusalem.

What Bernard Lewis saw in Iran

On By Martin Kramer

It is hard to tell whether the Iran war is a masterstroke, a misadventure, or something in between. “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.” When we do know, it will only be after the fact, so scoring the war now is premature. My own sense, based on no special intelligence, is that if the war were a boxing match, the referee would have stopped it by now.

My thoughts instead turn to my mentors, and the question of what they’d think if they were still among us. One comes especially to mind. 

Bernard Lewis (1916-2018) is best known as a historian of the Arab lands, the Ottoman Empire, and Turkey. But from the very outset, he had a particular interest in Shi‘ite Islam and Islamic Iran. He first visited Iran in 1950. “I traveled extensively around the country for a few weeks and found it a fascinating and hospitable place. The people were most tolerant of my fragmentary Persian.” He made several subsequent visits and attended the 1971 Persepolis celebrations as an official guest. He had a few audiences with the Shah, one in the year or so before the revolution.

Bernard Lewis meets Mohammad Reza Shah, early 1970s.

Lewis meets Mohammad Reza Shah, early 1970s.

Later, he wrote much-discussed articles on the Iranian revolution, particularly for the New York Review of Books in the 1980s and 1990s. (These can be found in his two collections, Islam and History and From Babel to Dragomans.) He never visited the Islamic Republic, despite receiving an invitation to participate in a conference on religious dialogue. “The subject is a very interesting and important one, but I did not feel inclined to discuss it under the auspices of the current regime.”

I was his student at Princeton during the Iranian revolution, and Lewis shares a revealing story about that time, which I remember well. Few in the West knew much about Ayatollah Khomeini, and neither did Lewis, so he went to the university library to see if Khomeini had written anything. There, he found the Arabic and Persian texts of Khomeini’s lectures in exile, now known in English as Islamic Government. This would later be called Khomeini’s Mein Kampf, a fitting comparison according to Lewis. 

It was a work of unrelenting extremism, promising a harsh and purifying Islamic regime. Lewis struggled to get Washington and the New York Times to take it seriously: many wanted to believe that Khomeini would fade away if the monarchy fell. You can see a youngish Lewis on TV here, eloquently warning of what would happen if Khomeini gained power. He was right, and Iran ended up with a clerical dictatorship. The Iranian revolution brought Lewis into the American spotlight for the first time, although it was 9/11 that later catapulted him into the stratosphere.

If Lewis were here, I think the media would ask him the now-ubiquitous question: Is regime change possible, and will foreign military action accelerate it? From time to time, the media did ask him that question, so we have his past answers spanning twenty years.

Lewis repeatedly insisted that the regime couldn’t last. In 1993, he told Le Monde:

The regime is firmly in place, but sooner or later it risks being replaced by a new Reza Khan. Regional centers that have become stronger could emerge, and Tehran’s power could be diminished. Some general might come with his army into the capital to restore the unity of the nation. This may be how the Islamic Revolution in Iran will end; it could happen tomorrow or in fifty years.

This speculation relied on Iran’s own history for a precedent. Reza Khan was the generalissimo who seized power and made himself shah in 1925. But in 1997, Lewis offered a different analogy, from Europe’s repertoire. The “aging and tiring” regime

faces mounting discontent among ever larger sections of the population at home. The Iranian revolutionaries are in many ways following the path of their French and Russian predecessors—the struggle of radicals and pragmatists, the terror, the Thermidorian reaction. It is not impossible that the Iranian Revolution, too, may culminate in a Napoleon or a Stalin. They would be wise to remember that Napoleon’s career ended at Waterloo and St. Helena and that Stalin’s legacy to the Soviet Union was disintegration and chaos.

Yet, while these analogies from the 1990s differed, Lewis anticipated a strongman would rise, centralize power, and break the fever of the revolution. 

After 9/11, Lewis began to speak of a different engine of regime change: not a man on horseback but the Iranian people. In 2001, he was asked if any country in the region was moving toward democracy. He gave a surprising answer:

I would say Iran is moving in that direction. They do have elections of a sort, it’s true, under a whole series of constraints. Nevertheless, it has been possible in Iran for the electorate, the people in general, to express an opinion. It’s indirect, it’s ineffectual, but it’s not unimportant because of that. And what you have, in effect, now in Iran is two governments: an elected government, which has no power, and a ruling government which was never elected and is not answerable. And that sets up tensions, which may well lead to the development of more democratic institutions.

Not only were Iranians moving toward democracy. They were moving toward America. In 2002, he noted that “after the events of Sept. 11, great numbers of people came out into the streets in Iranian cities, where, in defiance of the authorities, they lit candles and held vigils in sympathy and solidarity with the victims in New York and Washington. This contrasted markedly with the scenes of rejoicing elsewhere.” 

From this, he developed a thesis he repeated again and again: “While the citizens of supposedly ‘friendly’ Arab nations sometimes harbor deep anti-American resentment, the populations living under fiercely anti-American dictatorships—most notably Iran and Iraq—often hold strongly pro-American sentiments.” Indeed, they saw the United States as potential liberators. “You remember the scenes of rejoicing in Afghanistan,” he told an interviewer in 2002, after the United States brought down the Taliban regime. “I’ve been told by Iranian friends that that would look like a funeral compared with the rejoicing in Iran, if America would step in and help them get rid of their government.”

At about the same time, Lewis participated in an independent study group convened at the Pentagon’s behest. Its report, “Delta of Terrorism,” co-signed by Lewis and twelve other people, is remembered for advocating regime change in Iraq. But it also included a section on Iran. Not surprisingly, the Iran discussion followed lines of argument Lewis made elsewhere: Lewis was the senior figure in the group with knowledge of the Middle East, and the other two were his self-described disciples. 

Iran was presented there as “the most populous, developed, sophisticated society in the Muslim Middle East,” and “the region’s universal joint.” Its people were “increasingly pro-American, seeing the United States as the counterforce to a tired and calcified regime.” Thought of “any deals or accommodations” with the regime should be banished; the American goal should be “to undermine and eventually replace” it.

But this would happen from within. The United States “should begin contingency planning now for a U.S. response to a spontaneous popular revolution in Iran,” encouraged by “a Reagan-style information campaign of the kind we waged successfully in Poland and Serbia. Iran constitutes the new Eastern Europe for us. A liberated Iran—like a liberated Eastern Europe—transforms the regional power equation. ” 

Indeed, so powerful were the internal forces for change that they required only encouragement. “I realize I am sticking my neck out,” Lewis said in 2003, “but I would say that the prospects of a reasonably easy transition to democracy are better in Iran than in Iraq, because the regime in Iran, with all its faults, was not as destructive as that of Saddam Hussein.” Easy? In 2007, he discerned “a level of discontent at home, which could be exploited. I do not think it would be too difficult to bring it to the point when the regime could be overthrown.”

In 2011, he added another element: fracturing within the regime. He told the Wall Street Journal:

There is strong opposition to the regime—two oppositions—the opposition within the regime and the opposition against the regime. And I think that sooner or later the regime in Iran will be overthrown and something more open, more democratic, will emerge. Most Iranian patriots are against the regime. They feel it is defaming and dishonoring their country. And they’re right of course.

Lewis didn’t specify a timeline for this process, but he still framed it as an internal one.

Alas, the nuclear program made waiting problematic. Lewis had a strong view on Iran’s program. “There is a radical difference between the Islamic Republic of Iran and other governments with nuclear weapons,” he wrote. “This difference is expressed in what can only be described as the apocalyptic worldview of Iran’s present rulers.” Famously, he said that for Iran’s regime (under Ahmedinejad in particular), Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was “not a constraint; it is an inducement.” (In 2012, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu quoted Lewis before the UN, adding this flourish: “Iran’s apocalyptic leaders believe that a medieval holy man will reappear in the wake of a devastating Holy War, thereby ensuring that their brand of radical Islam will rule the earth.”)

Even so, Lewis repeatedly ruled out a military “invasion” to change the regime. He said this in 2006:

I don’t think it’s a good idea to launch an armed invasion. There is a great deal one can do short of that to indicate displeasure, to make things difficult and to encourage resistance among the subjects of the Iranian government. And there is ample evidence of widespread unhappiness and discontent among the people of Iran. I think we could do more to encourage and help them in a number of ways.

In 2007, he reiterated his objection. What Iranians wanted was “not a military invasion. My Iranian friends and various groups are unanimous on that point. They feel a military invasion would be counterproductive.”

He also hesitated about military action short of invasion. In a lecture given sometime between 2009 and 2011, he insisted that other options hadn’t been exhausted.

What are the possibilities in dealing with this threat from Iran? I think one can divide them into two: one is the obvious military one. It may reach a point when there is no other; I do not personally believe that we have reached that point yet, and I believe that, even in talking about it, it is very important not to give the regime a free gift of something that they do not at present enjoy, that is, the support of Iranian patriotism…. I think one has to handle this very carefully and before deciding that the military option is the only one that remains. There are possibilities internally within Iran, opportunities which I think have been underused or totally neglected.… It seems to me that, for the moment, one should aim at disruption rather than a military action.

He immediately followed this with a caveat: “I must, in concluding, admit the possibility that one may, at some time, reach a situation when there is no other option available.” But for the rest of his life—he died in 2018 just shy of age 102—he never publicly stated that such a “point” or “situation” had been reached. In 2012, when asked whether he supported military action against Iran, Lewis said: “I don’t think it’s the right answer…. We should do what we can to help the Iranian opposition. We could do a lot to help them and we’re not doing a damn thing, as far as I know.” “It may come to [military action],” he added, but it hadn’t yet. 

So Lewis didn’t completely rule out using force, but he viewed it as a last resort that, if mishandled, could spark a patriotic outpouring and turn into a “free gift” to the regime. 

Would he have made the same argument today? It’s a question that cannot be answered, as events since his death would have shaped his perspective. The most significant of these are progress in Iran’s nuclear program, which was less advanced in the 2010s, and the regime’s growing ruthlessness. Lewis lived a very long life and saw historic shifts in power. He stayed relevant for so long because he understood and explained change. So we don’t know how he would have responded to changing conditions in Iran, and we can only regret that no one of his caliber has replaced him.

Still, revisiting Lewis helps us frame the questions that will occupy us moving forward. Is there a foundation for democracy beneath the battered shell of the Islamic Republic? If so, can foreign military and clandestine actions help expand it? If there are two oppositions, inside and outside the regime, could they unite? Or will the war only strengthen the regime? It’s probably fair to say that the threat posed by Iran’s regime has been diminished. The key question now is, will the promise of Iran’s people also be fulfilled?


Header image: An official travel permit issued to Lewis in April 1965 for a trip across Iranian Azerbaijan starting in Tabriz. This followed a lecture series delivered by Lewis in Tehran, organized by the British Council.


Below: covers of Lewis’s books in Persian translation. Left to right, top row: The Origins of Isma‘ilism; The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam; What Went Wrong?: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response. Middle row: The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror; The End of Modern History in the Middle East; The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years. Bottom row: The Muslim Discovery of Europe; Faith and Power: Religion and Politics in the Middle East; The Jews of Islam.

In Iran, survival isn’t victory

On By Martin Kramer

On February 27, 1991, President George H.W. Bush addressed the American people, announcing the end of offensive military operations against Saddam Hussein’s forces. Iraqi troops had been completely expelled from Kuwait, which they had invaded the previous summer. During six weeks of bombing and a 100-hour ground campaign called “Desert Storm,” the U.S. and coalition allies destroyed about two dozen Iraqi divisions, hundreds of Iraqi aircraft, thousands of tanks, and Iraq’s weapons industry. A retreating Iraqi column was utterly destroyed during its escape from Kuwait. Gruesome images from that “highway of death” vividly showed the scale of Iraq’s defeat.

The following day, February 28, Bush made this entry in his diary:

It’s now early Thursday morning on the 28th. Still no feeling of euphoria. I think I know why it is. After my speech last night, Baghdad radio started broadcasting that we’ve been forced to capitulate. I see on the television that public opinion in Jordan and in the streets of Baghdad is that they have won. It is such a canard, so little, but it’s what concerns me. It hasn’t been a clean end—there is no battleship Missouri surrender. This is what’s missing to make this akin to WWII, to separate Kuwait from Korea and Vietnam.… The headlines are great. “We Win.” The television accurately reflects the humiliation of Saddam Hussein and it drives the point home to the American people. But internationally, it’s not there yet, at least in the Arab world that has been lined up with Saddam.

The fact that the enemy refused to acknowledge defeat troubled Bush. “Obviously,” he comforted himself, “when the [Iraqi] troops straggle home with no armor, beaten up, 50,000 … and maybe more dead, the people of Iraq will know.” But if they knew, Saddam regime’s made sure they never showed it. In 2003, Saddam shared his perspective with American television journalist Dan Rather:

In 1991 Iraq was not defeated. In fact, our army withdrew from Kuwait according to a decision taken by us. Yes, it withdrew, but when we were back within our boundaries, the boundaries of Iraq, the Iraqi army was not defeated. Nor was the people of Iraq…. It was [Bush’s] decision to…. stop the fighting. And, consequently, Iraq was not defeated.

No one knows how the current Iran war will end, but two things seem certain. The Supreme Leader will not send his representative to sign an unconditional surrender on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. And whoever leads the regime will declare victory for Iran, regardless of how much damage the U.S. and Israel inflict. In that respect, the Islamic Republic is no different from Saddam’s Iraq.

Iran has not experienced a military victory against a foreign enemy since the 18th century. As a result, its leaders are skilled at presenting defeats as draws, and draws (like the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s) as victories. This is a coping strategy that allows Iran to preserve some dignity as the inheritor of past empires, which once thrived on legendary military triumphs and territorial conquests. A self-soothing narrative hides from Iranians the simple truth that Iran isn’t a global power. It’s not even the leading power in the Middle East. It’s too poor, corrupt, mismanaged, and divided to enjoy such a high status, no matter how much the regime tries to rally Iran’s people into sacrifices.

It’s now being said that if the regime remains in power, it’s somehow a triumph. “To survive would count as victory for Iran’s regime,” announces the Economist. But that’s Saddam-think. Survival isn’t victory unless it’s accompanied by a strategic gain that outweighs military losses. Since 1978, the Islamic Republic has aimed for Iran’s dominance of the Persian Gulf and the broader Middle East through ambitious weapons programs and support for proxies across the region. Survival is a poor substitute for losing all that, and most of it is already gone.

In 1991, George H.W. Bush had people around him who reassured him that it didn’t matter what people in the streets of Amman or Baghdad thought. What mattered was the objective achievement of defined war aims. They understood then, and we know in retrospect, that the war finished off Iraq as a pretender to regional power. Mission accomplished.

Thirty-five years later, Operation Desert Storm is remembered as the last decisive victory the United States won in a regional war—even though, at the time, America’s president thought it wasn’t a “clean end.” If that war didn’t end cleanly, the Iran war won’t either. The question is whether those who launched this war have the wisdom to realize it.

Header image: President Donald J. Trump attends transfer of remains of six US soldiers killed in an Iranian drone strike in Kuwait, March 7, 2026, at Dover Air Force Base, Delaware. Official White House photo by Daniel Torok, public domain.