I told Lisa the Librarian that I was looking for a “read,” maybe a noir mystery. She said that she preferred spy stories and recommended Daniel Silva, a name I recognized from bestseller lists but whom I had never read. Lisa suggested The English Girl, published in 2013, the first Silva she had read. Early on I was not only hooked by the book but also struck by the author’s seeming prescience.

Shamron, a high-level Israeli security agent, is trying to recruit Gabriel, Israeli art restorer, assassin, and spy, for a mission. Shamron states that the American president “says that he will not allow the Iranians to build nuclear weapons. But that declaration is meaningless if the Iranians have the capability to build them in a short period of time.”

Gabriel indicates that this would apply to Japan, but Shamron rejoins, “The Japanese are not ruled by apocalyptic Shia mullahs. If the American president isn’t careful, his two most important foreign policy achievements will be a nuclear Iran and the restoration of the Islamic caliphate.”

Silva’s prescience, however, was limited. He did not foresee that in 2015, two years after the book’s publication, Iran would agree with the United States, England, France, China, Russia, and Germany to limit its uranium enrichment to levels far below that needed for nuclear weapons. That agreement had a major limitation: It expired in 2030, but presumably as that deadline came, there would have been further negotiations to extend the accord. On the other hand, the agreement had two major positives: Iran agreed to ship its more highly enriched uranium out of the country, and, because the agreement also allowed for the international inspection of Iranian facilities, atomic energy inspectors were granted widespread access. All the countries and the inspectors indicated that the agreement was working. Silva had not foreseen that Iran would cede its capability of quickly making a nuclear weapon.

Of course, Silva could not also see that the accord would be an agreement interruptus, when Trump, with his Obama Derangement Syndrome, withdrew from the accord. Trump asserted, without proof and ignoring what the other countries and the inspectors had concluded, that Iran was not living up to the deal.

Not surprisingly, after the U.S. withdrawal, what could easily have been foreseen happened; Iran starting enriching uranium to higher levels than it had before. It was now closer to building nuclear weapons that could be put on missiles than it had in 2013 when The English Girl came out and much higher than before Trump broke the agreement. Silva did not foresee that an American president, Trump, would actually enable Iran to be closer to a bomb than ever before.

Silva’s prescience was limited in another way. Shamron opines that Israel is “foolish to leave our security in [American] hands. [Israeli] generals aren’t sure they can destroy enough of the program to make a military strike effective. And [Israeli intelligence] is telling the prime minister that a unilateral war with the Persians would be a catastrophe of biblical proportions.”

Silva did not foresee that with Trump as president, Israel could easily get America to undertake military actions that Israel wanted done.

Now we are involved in a deadly “excursion” against Iran. Unfortunately, we have seen this movie before. According to Louis Menand in The New Yorker of April 20, 2026, an Assistant Secretary of Defense in March 1965 stated what he saw as U.S. goals in Vietnam: “The principal aim was ‘to avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat.’ He assigned this a weight of seventy per cent. Second, at twenty per cent, was to keep Southeast Asia out of Chinese hands. And the third, at ten per cent, was to permit the people of South Vietnam to enjoy a better, freer way of life.” Compare and contrast with Trump’s present goals in Iran, assuming you know what they are.