calibrate

At 69, Chief Justice John Roberts has plenty of time left to calibrate his retirement for a like-minded successor.

It takes an enormous amount of resources and a tremendous number of people working together with a sustained investment to create something and to run and to launch and deploy and calibrate and keep maintaining something like the James Webb Space Telescope.

President Biden and his administration, Israel’s constant supplier of weapons and diplomatic support, are trying to calibrate a response that might offer Iran a way to stop the accelerating climb up the ladder of escalation, a phrase strategists use to describe the way wars speed from crisis to disaster.

But whatever response it chooses, it will likely calibrate it to be just short of triggering a regional war that would draw in the US and which it could not win.

But whatever response Iran chooses, it will likely calibrate it to be just short of triggering a war that it cannot hope to win.