Hello, and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest, your Tuesday foreign policy edition.

🚨 A quick note that, due to a technical error, yesterday’s edition of this email was missing part of Peter Hamby’s brilliant report assessing Trump’s putative V.P. shortlist—including the evolving thinking inside Mar-a-Lago. You may enjoy his chat with Steve Bannon, too. Our apologies for the error. You can read the full story here.

Also, Beltway people, my new Puck partner John Ourand broke the news tonight that a couple private equity billionaires bought my hometown team, the Orioles. (I’m a soccer person, I think baseball is not a sport, but you get my point.) You should sign up for John’s excellent new private email on the business of sports, The Varsity, here.

In tonight’s email, what I’m hearing in Washington about the Biden administration’s careful, internal calculus as it determines how, and where, to retaliate after an Iranian-backed drone strike killed three American service members in Jordan.

But first…

• Russian émigrés under fire: On Thursday, seven members of the ultra-popular Russian-language rock band Bi-2 were arrested just before their performance in the Thai resort town of Phuket, allegedly for playing without a permit. They were fined $95, but then things took a deeply sinister turn when the Russian consul in Bangkok got involved. The rockers had fled Russia after its invasion of Ukraine, and its members have been outspoken critics of the war. Frontman Igor Bortnik has even expressed public support for the Ukrainian military and even raised funds for an ambulance for them. Because of that, the Kremlin is accusing Bi-2 of sponsoring terrorism and, very conveniently, it has signed an extradition treaty with Thailand.

  Bortnik has Israeli citizenship, another band member has Australian citizenship, and several other band members are Israeli permanent residents. So after the intervention of Israeli authorities, Thai authorities had arranged for the band’s extradition to Israel. But after several senior officials from the Russian consulate visited the prison where the members of Bi-2 were being held in the tropical heat, suddenly, the plan of deporting the band to Tel Aviv went up in smoke. Now, only Bortnik will be going to Israel, another will be sent to Sydney, and the rest of the band is facing deportation to Russia, even though not all of them have Russian citizenship. Once there, they could face years in jail on terrorism charges.

  This news has deeply shaken the Russian émigré community, most of whom fled after Moscow’s invasion nearly two years ago. Until now, Vladimir Putin and his F.S.B. enforcers had been acting under the old, unspoken rules of the K.G.B.’s late Soviet era, when dissident artists and opponents of the regime could go to jail at home, or they could emigrate. If they chose the latter option, they could write and paint and compose music and make it as anti-Soviet as they liked. The Soviet authorities, who were focused squarely on a domestic audience shut off from the outside world, didn’t much care.

  Now, that rule, like so many others, is apparently out the window. The Kremlin has been pressuring other countries to crack down on dissident artists who have fled Russia. The U.A.E. fined comedian Maxim Galkin for expressing support for Ukraine in one of his shows and banned rapper Morgenshtern from entry; both artists fled Russia and criticized its government. Thai venues canceled Galkin’s shows, and the Indonesian government banned his entry to Bali. (Galkin said that Indonesian border authorities showed him a letter from the Russian government asking Jakarta to keep Galkin out of the country.)

  But the arrest and potential extradition of Bi-2 is horrifying on a whole new level. The fact that such a popular band with such a wide following has faced such brutal treatment is clearly a message to artists: You are defenseless. “Of course, the point is to show that you can’t hide,” said Mikhail Kozyrev, a Russian journalist who is friends with the band members. “The message is, ‘We remember everything, and we will intimidate everyone.’ It’s like with Khodorkovsky: Jail the richest person in Russia so that everyone else thinks, ‘[If they can do that to him], they’ll completely destroy me.’ Throw the most popular band in jail so that everyone who is against the war starts looking over their shoulder.”

  Kozyrev, like other friends of mine who are close with the band, has been pushing for Western attention and outcry over Bi-2’s treatment. “I think the main thing is, without Western protection, none of us is safe,” Kozyrev said. I pointed out that even with Western help, safety wasn’t guaranteed. Kozyrev agreed. “Alas,” he said.

For starters: Bush reported just $19,000 cash on hand in October, a stunningly low sum. The 47-year-old former Black Lives Matter activist is a pretty good fundraiser, having hauled about $430,000 this cycle through the end of the third quarter, but she’s also got a high burn rate. Her Democratic primary opponent, Wesley Bell, is cash poor too—he had about $88,000 on hand as of his most recent filing—but recently announced a $500,000 haul last quarter. He also has a legitimate, professional campaign behind him, with veteran consultants on his disbursements sheet.

Bush, a vocal critic of Israel’s war in Gaza, is also facing a potential AIPAC-fueled ad campaign against her. But she has a national following and knows how to marshal attention on social media. It wouldn’t shock me if she kickstarts her campaign fundraising and solves her money problems, at least. Also, she’s got time: The Missouri primary isn’t until August. And voters do often give lawmakers the benefit of the doubt while under investigation—to a point. (Rep. Henry Cuellar, whose house was raided by the F.B.I. just weeks before his 2022 primary race, is doing just fine. The F.B.I. still hasn’t explained that incident.)

Anyway, we’ll know much more in the next day or so, when campaigns file their 4Q23 campaign finance reports. I’ve been anxious to see if/how Bush and fellow Israel critics Jamaal Bowman and Summer Lee—all of whom had low cash on hand in September—responded to political pressure this fall over the Israel-Hamas conflict. Watch this space…

In the four months since October 7, Iran has been using the Israel-Hamas war as the perfect excuse to foment chaos and assert its dominance, with its proxies mounting constant attacks on U.S. troops in the Middle East and on international container ships passing through the Red Sea. The Biden administration, of course, has been trying to prevent the escalating violence from spiraling into all-out regional war—stopping it, for example, from exploding in such a way that Americans would be killed and their government would be forced to respond in a more, well, forceful way.

Now that the thing everyone feared has actually come to pass, however, President Biden finds himself under enormous pressure to respond in kind. Over the weekend, he said in a written statement that America will counter “at a time and in a manner of our choosing,” which is generally what you say when you’re not ready to respond and would like everyone to chill out for a second, lower their expectations, and move on so you don’t have to do anything that you’ll regret. It is, in short, a way to stall. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah used pretty much the same phrasing back in December after Israel assassinated a top Hezbollah militant in Damascus. Nasrallah said he reserved “the right to respond to this assassination at the time and place of our choosing.” Political playing-for-time parlance, it turns out, is universal.

Some in the NatSec community want to go hard—Iran only understands force, they say. “They have this obsessive fear of escalation everywhere on the planet,” one former intelligence official complained of the Biden administration, citing their fears of nuclear confrontation with Russia over Ukraine. Still others are hoping the White House decides not to do anything too crazy and just keeps the lid on a pot that continues to try to boil over.

It’s a hard balance to strike. How do you respond in a way that reestablishes deterrence but doesn’t set off a larger conflagration? “Other than Hezbollah, Iran sees its proxies as expendable,” former ambassador Dennis Ross told me. “They’re perfectly willing to fight to the last Houthi, so hitting back at proxies doesn’t affect their calculus. You’d have to do something that would affect their thinking. On one hand, you’re not really interested in a longer conflict in the region or a tit-for-tat with Iran because you don’t know where that would lead. On the other hand, if they see you’re too hesitant to do it, they’ll see they can get away with it. You don’t want them feeling you’re reluctant to hit them because you’re afraid of escalation.”

The question, Ross said, is: “Can you do that without hitting a target that is more directly Iranian? I’m not sure you can.”

Could the U.S. go after Iran’s nuclear program, which is rapidly ramping up? We could, said Ross, but it would have to be covert. “Otherwise, they feel they have to respond because it looks like they’re surrendering if they don’t,” he explained. “You have to give them a way to save face.”

On Tuesday morning, Biden told reporters that he has already decided how to respond to Iran but declined to say more. A few hours later, Kataib Hezbollah, the militant group that the U.S. thinks might be behind the attack on Tower 22, said, unexpectedly, that it would cease all operations against U.S. forces in the region. The Pentagon spokesman, Brigadier General Patrick Ryder, dismissed the statement, saying that “actions speak louder than words” and adding pointedly that there had been three attacks on American troops since the fatal hit in Jordan. Then he reiterated the Biden administration’s stance. “I don’t think we could be any more clear that we have called on the Iranian proxy groups to stop their attacks,” Ryder said. “They have not, and so we will respond in a time and manner of our choosing.” Whatever that means.

Julia