That night, June 9 -- On Sunday afternoon, Donald Trump told The Financial Times that he alone controls the direction of the war with Iran. "I call the shots," he said. "I call all the shots. Netanyahu doesn't call the shots."

an attack the United States had urged against. A senior American official had told Axios hours before the planes took off that he did not expect an imminent Israeli strike.

The sequence put one of the defining claims of Trump's second term to an immediate and painful test. Whatever the president believes about his command authority over the Middle East theater, the June 8 strikes suggest that the actual decision-making structure is more complicated than Sunday's FT interview implied.

The background to the latest ...