In 2016, Xiyue Wang, an American citizen and a PhD candidate at Princeton University, traveled to Tehran to improve his Persian, and to conduct archival research on the governance of border provinces in the 19th and early 20th centuries. A few months later he was arrested and sent to the Evin prison, where he was held for 40 months, most of which he spent in solitary confinement. He emerged thoroughly disabused of his former faith in the possibility of U.S conciliation with the Islam Republic. He had a similar change in attitude toward his university. Peter Theroux writes:

While Iranian jailers were torturing Wang and hundreds of others at Evin, the [Iranian] government was projecting an image of wounded innocence to the world, the seeker of a peaceful nuclear-energy program and the victim of unfair sanctions. But the beatings and abuse Wang received had a specific objective: to extract a confession of espionage and a propaganda video that would raise his price as a hostage, worthy of exchanging for the release of Iranian assets or prisoners.

Back at Princeton, there would eventually be candlelight vigils and social-media support, but not until the one-year anniversary of his captivity. The university spent that first year avoiding making waves on his behalf. Not that it lacked leverage: its faculty, inside and outside its Iran Studies Center, boasted big names with ties to Tehran, including the former regime official Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a senior nuclear negotiator who served as Iran’s ambassador to Germany during the September 1992 massacre of Kurdish dissidents in a Berlin restaurant. (A German court found the Iranian government culpable up to the highest levels; Mousavian called the allegations “a joke” and said that Iran would never violate human rights.)

Princeton advised Wang’s wife, Hua Qu, not to make waves either; it was not until July 2017 that the news of Wang’s captivity broke, and it was the Iranians who broke it—followed a few days later by their demand for the release of Iranian prisoners in the United States. A year after that, Princeton released a statement on the matter that . . . conspicuously didn’t include a demand for Wang’s release.

After his return, Wang discovered that the Iran Studies Center had removed him from its mailing list.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.