The result of Tuesday’s vote in Parliament on Prime Minister Theresa May’s terms of departure from the European Union was ultimately not a surprise. Her minority government is deeply divided over Brexit and Ms. May’s own leadership.

But the scale of defeat that her plan suffered in Parliament – an emphatic 432 against to 202 for – has brought new uncertainty to a process meant to be coming to an end in just over 70 days’ time.

It has even thrown the survival of May’s government into question; The opposition Labour Party immediately filed a no-confidence motion that will be voted on Wednesday. Whatever happens next, the deadline for Britain’s departure – March 29 at midnight – is now certain to be extended or even shelved as members of Parliament seek to corral May into exploring alternatives to her deal, including a possible second referendum.

For now, Britain’s own statutes dictate an exit on March 29, with or without a formal agreement. To avoid a chaotic no-deal Brexit, Parliament will need to pass new legislation and to request an extension from the 27 other EU members that gives breathing space for British lawmakers.

“I think what we will see is an emphatic rejection of no-deal, and Parliament will then try to ensure that there is further time to work out whether an alternative deal is more acceptable,” says Robert Hazell, professor of government and the constitution at King’s College London.

Even before Tuesday’s defeat, the largest in living memory, the timetable for an orderly Brexit was tight. To implement the agreement, a slew of domestic legislation has to pass both houses of Parliament before being signed into law. EU leaders have already signaled that a modest delay would be allowed if Parliament had agreed on the terms of departure and needed to tie up loose ends. But extending by more than a few months would be a bigger ask.

Over the past week, backbench MPs have worked across the aisle to pass amendments that tied May’s hands in the event of her deal being rejected. Some have called for Parliament to hold votes on what direction it wants to take on Brexit, with or without government assent.

But finding a consensus on that direction is fraught, not least because public opinion is also split, says John Curtice, a politics professor at the University of Strathclyde. Both May and her opposition counterpart, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, preside over splintered parties in which a pragmatic center is hard to locate. “It’s perfectly clear that we’re not leaving on the 29th of March. But it’s very difficult to resolve. The country is very polarized,” he says.

For pro-Brexit voters who simply want politicians to finish the job, Tuesday’s vote is likely to disappoint. “What we’re seeing from British public is Brexit fatigue. They just want the government to get on with it,” says Alex de Ruyter, director of the Center for Brexit Studies at Birmingham City University.

A spokesman for May said that she expected to survive Wednesday’s no-confidence vote and would move to consult senior MPs on all sides about Parliament’s views on Brexit. Under an amendment passed last week, a move that angered pro-Brexit MPs, May has to report back to Parliament by Monday on her next move.

Asked if she would resign after such a humiliating defeat, the spokesman told reporters: “She wants to deliver Brexit in the way that the people voted for.”

Before Tuesday’s vote, many had expected May to seek further concessions from European leaders that could make her agreement more acceptable to wavering MPs. In her final appeal to lawmakers before the vote, she insisted that the withdrawal agreement – the legally binding treaty put to Parliament – would remain part of any orderly Brexit. Talk of going back to Brussels to draw up a new agreement was futile, she told the House. “No such alternative deal exists.”

Among the sticking points for rebels in her own party has been the intra-Ireland backstop, a feature of the agreement that would keep Britain inside the EU customs union in order to prevent a hard border between Ireland, an EU member, and Northern Ireland. It only comes into effect if the two sides are unable to negotiate a new trade agreement by the end of 2020.

Labour’s leadership opposes May’s agreement and has repeatedly called for an election so that it can offer an alternative to voters. Mr. Corbyn rose to his feet after Tuesday’s vote to drive home his point. “This government has lost the confidence of the House,” he said.

However, Corbyn has been reluctant to push for a second referendum that could split his base. Should he fail to bring down May’s government via a parliamentary vote, pro-EU supporters are certain to step up the pressure on him.

At the same time, Labour MPs in pro-Leave seats will confront their own dilemma if another Brexit vote is held, says Helen Thompson, a professor of political economy at the University of Cambridge. Leave voters may object to the compromises that May has reached with EU negotiators, but they also want to make Brexit happen. “At a certain point there are a number of Labour MPs with a difficult decision to make,” she says.

While Parliament can pass laws and express its wishes, it can’t replace the government at the negotiating table. Should a cross-party bloc of MPs seek to change course, for example by asking the EU to delay Brexit, it would still need the government’s assent, says Dr. de Ruyter. And May has yet to change her negotiating stance toward Brexit, the issue that has defined her premiership ever since she took power in the aftermath of the 2016 referendum.

“The EU doesn’t negotiate with Parliament,” he says, “they negotiate with the government.”

On a Sunday in early December, the Rev. Cary Gordon delivers his weekly sermon to a congregation that fills row after row of plush red pews.

Scripture, he tells them, doesn’t follow people’s preferences or the changing times. “The Bible is the inerrant word of God,” Mr. Gordon says. “To believe that is fundamental to what it means to be a true Christian in this world.”

For worshipers here at Cornerstone World Outreach, as for many others in this northwest Iowa district, life is anchored on a Christian morality that demands strict obedience to God’s law and the law of the land.

And for nine consecutive terms, the voters here have elected a representative who is increasingly regarded by those outside the district as at best controversial – and at worst, racist.

Welcome to Iowa’s Fourth District, home of Republican Rep. Steve King.

Last week, the congressman drew fire for wondering aloud in a New York Times interview why the terms “white nationalism” and “white supremacy” are considered offensive. The comments led House Republicans on Monday to strip Congressman King of committee assignments for the 116th Congress. The House voted 424 to 1 Tuesday to condemn white supremacy, while two other Democrats have introduced censure resolutions against King. (In a statement, King rejected white supremacy and insisted that his comments have been mischaracterized.)

But while the public condemnation – particularly from Republicans – may be new, the tenor of King’s comments was not. King has for years made caustic remarks about unauthorized immigrants with almost no repercussions, and the Iowa lawmaker has been key in mainstreaming once-fringe positions, like building a border wall or ending birthright citizenship. Since President Trump’s election, those ideas have become more popular on the right – even as King himself has become more controversial.

“I tend to walk into a room and people line up on one side or the other, yeah,” he tells the Monitor.

To his supporters here, in the Iowan version of the Bible Belt, he’s a kind of hometown hero. To them, King is one of the last defenders of a conservatism that is dead set against abortion, convinced there is only one true kind of marriage, and – in a state that increasingly relies on immigrant labor but remains one of the least diverse in the country – determined to protect itself from the “cultural corruption” they say comes with unrestricted and illegal immigration. Nothing the national media reports about him is likely to change their minds.

Indeed, King’s resilience in his district serves as a measure of the widening political chasm in this country on questions of culture and race. Where a growing share of the nation accepts, even welcomes, the diversifying face of America, there’s a sense among King’s supporters that those changes are destroying what the Founding Fathers built.  

“In the 1950s, they did a comic book called ‘Bizarro World.’ Up is actually down, left is right, right is left,” says Gordon, who has known and supported King for 20 years. “I feel like the political landscape right now in our whole country is kind of Bizarro World.”

Jessica Mendoza/The Christian Science Monitor

The Rev. Cary Gordon sits in one of the pews that fill Cornerstone World Outreach on Dec. 9, 2018, in Sioux City, Iowa. ‘The congressman does not have a constituency that necessarily agrees with every single thing he says and does,’ says Mr. Gordon, a longtime supporter of Rep. Steve King. ‘What he has is a constituency that knows the kind of a man that he is.’

‘We’re Christians first’

The Fourth District – which until redistricting in 2013 was the Fifth – is a mostly rural, majority-white area where 39 percent of active voters are registered Republicans. A quarter are Democrats, while about 36 percent are not registered with any party. Before last year’s midterms, King had won nearly every election since 2002 by double digits.

“We’re Christians first. Then we’re conservatives. And then we’re Republicans,” says Jacob Hall, a local sports editor, at a HyVee supermarket just down the road from the Cornerstone church. Mr. Hall is a leader of the Sioux County Conservatives, a group that mobilizes conservative voters, and a veteran of Gordon’s sermons.

“I won’t do or support anything that I don’t think is biblical,” he says. At the top of the list are abortion and same-sex marriage. But immigration is wrapped up in that thinking, too.

Some of it comes from a respect for laws and rules. Hall says all unauthorized immigrants are lawbreakers by definition, which is why he’s fully behind King’s, and the president’s, efforts to secure the border. “I’m pretty sure heaven has gates that people have to go through,” he says.

On a deeper level, though, views on immigration here are colored by a strong opposition to multiculturalism – which King’s supporters see as eroding American heritage and longstanding moral absolutes.

“Here’s what multiculturalism really is: disharmony and antagonism, different cultures vying for dominance,” says Gordon, the pastor.

“They want to go back to the 1950s, to this fairy-tale land where women stayed home and took care of the kids and the men went out and made enough money,” says David Andersen, who teaches political psychology at Iowa State University. “Everybody went to church on Sundays and celebrated Christmas. And frankly, everybody was white and spoke English.”

That view comes directly out of their experience, Professor Andersen adds. As of 2015, immigrants made up only about 5 percent of Iowa’s population. The state is beginning to rely more on immigrant labor, including unauthorized workers, but it’s still more than 90 percent white. That’s truer in King’s district than in any other part of the state.

“They see Latinos from caravans that crash the southern border [on TV]. They see African-Americans from gangland shootings in Chicago,” Andersen says. “Their experience is not what urban Americans experience, where you see people who are nonwhite all the time.”

In his 16 years in office, King has never wavered in protecting what he defines as American culture. He’s been talking about a border wall for years, even building a model of it on the House floor in 2006. Since 2011, he’s tried five times to end birthright citizenship through legislation. (His latest attempt was at the start of this Congress.) He also introduced a measure that would, with very narrow exceptions, make it a crime for a doctor to knowingly perform an abortion.

“He has been consistent on protecting the interests of everybody – red, yellow, black, and white, they are precious in His sight – that’s already a citizen from the kinds of inherent crimes that come from having porous borders and sloppy enforcement,” Gordon says. “That resonates with people.”

Could the congressman be more thoughtful about his words and actions, and defend himself better against accusations of racism? Sure, Gordon says. But he believes the press is mostly to blame for twisting his words.

That’s because another thread common to King’s voters is a disregard for mainstream media. Some of the recent controversy surrounding King stems from reports that he met with members of a far-right party with alleged Nazi ties in Austria, endorsed a Canadian white nationalist candidate for mayor, and compared Mexican immigrants to dirt.  

But to his supporters back home, that’s just biased journalists blowing things out of proportion. “It’s to a point,” Hall says, “where if you’re a true Christian conservative and the national media isn’t portraying you in a negative light, what are you doing wrong?”

Cracks in the conservative wall

In the weeks before the 2018 midterm election, headlines began crowing about the beginning of the end for King. His Democratic opponent, first-time candidate J.D. Scholten, was a young, energetic former professional baseball player who brought his message of rural development and common-sense health care across the district in a Winnebago.

Mr. Scholten drew national attention for his unlikely bid – and the fact that he outraised King throughout the campaign. The main challenge he faced was numbers: How many Republican or lean-Republican voters could he convince to switch sides?

“Not enough,” Scholten says, over coffee at a downtown cafe in Des Moines.

In the end, he lost to King by three percentage points, a close call that shocked political observers. Many saw it as a sign that times were changing in Iowa’s Fourth District, if slowly. “I’ve gotten congratulated more for losing than I ever have in my entire life,” Scholten says, grinning.

Cracks in the district’s conservative wall are showing even in King’s hometown. Storm Lake, a town of about 10,000 located some 70 miles east of Sioux City, is today 40 percent white, 37 percent Latino, and 15 percent Asian, home to immigrants – many unauthorized – from Mexico, El Salvador, and Laos, who came to work at the city’s meat processing plants. King won the county by just 50 votes.

Jessica Mendoza/The Christian Science Monitor

José Ibarra shares a table with his wife, Jeaneth, on Dec. 9, 2018, at a diner in Storm Lake, Iowa. Mr. Ibarra is a city councilman who came to the US from Mexico when he was 13. He’s hopeful that the next election will see Rep. Steve King voted out of office.

At a diner there Sunday morning, José Ibarra, a first-term city councilman who came to the US from Mexico when he was 13, sips soda water as he explains how the changing makeup of the town is slowly changing mind-sets.

“There’s a lot of people here that know an immigrant who may be illegal,” Mr. Ibarra says. “They know that hey, these people? They just want to come here and work.”

And while it wasn’t enough to defeat King last fall, Ibarra is hopeful that there may be enough of a shift for someone else to take King’s seat in the next election. “2020 will be different,” he says. “I just feel it.”

Forces do seem to be building against King, even from within the GOP.  

Last week, Iowa state Sen. Randy Feenstra, a Republican, announced he would challenge the congressman in the 2020 primary, saying the district deserves leadership without “sideshows or distractions.” Iowa’s Republican senators, Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst, have both publicly condemned him.

Even Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, whose 2016 presidential campaign King co-chaired until Mr. Cruz dropped out, criticized the congressman on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

One important ally

But King still has one important ally: the president. The two men have ties that predate Trump’s presidential bid. And they see eye to eye on immigration, with Trump in many ways legitimizing ideas that King has been promoting for years. On Monday, Trump claimed he hadn’t been following the recent controversy surrounding the congressman.

In a conversation with the Monitor just before the holidays, King defended himself against accusations of racism. The left, he says, has weaponized terms like “racist,” “Nazi,” and “white nationalist,” using them against anyone who dares to defend American values or the Constitution. “There are people that don’t like America the way it is,” he says, “and there are people that don’t like America when she was at her best. They want to tear down the systems we have. I don’t believe that. I think our Founding Fathers got it right.”

He would use a similar defense when taking to the House floor last week to address the reaction to the Times's article. “I am an advocate for Western civilization and its values,” he said. “This does not make me a white supremacist or white nationalist.” Instead, he called himself an “American nationalist.”

It’s a view King’s staunchest supporters share.

“America has its shortcomings. But as far as the good that it has done in the world, I think it’s unrivaled by any other country,” Hall says. “Why’s that so controversial to say?”

That doesn’t mean the congressman has a constituency that agrees with him on everything, Gordon adds. “What he has is a constituency that knows the kind of a man that he is,” he says. “That he is a good man, who has an identifiable moral compass, and that he will, in some reasonable fashion, represent them in the mess that is Congress.”

“I think he can have this job for as long as he wants.”

Hussein Malla/AP/File

A US soldier sits on an armored vehicle at a newly installed position in Manbij, Syria, in April 2018.

When President Trump agrees with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic Party adversary he most likes to bait and denigrate, it’s worth taking note. Especially on an issue of real policy significance.

In this case, it’s the belief that the US military presence in both Syria and Afghanistan is wrong, and that a main reason the troops are still there is a cozy consensus among America’s defense and foreign-policy “establishment.” Mr. Trump is backing his words with action, ordering a pullout from Syria and signaling his determination to reduce troop levels in Afghanistan.

Yet with political debate likely to intensify as such pullouts proceed, it’s important to recognize that Part 2 of the Trump-Warren argument – the notion of a self-reinforcing, pro-war consensus among policy experts and professionals – is at the least an oversimplification.

There was indeed broad establishment consensus on the need to contain Soviet expansion during much of the cold war. The long, failed war in Vietnam also enjoyed such support at first. As David Halberstam revealed in his seminal 1972 book “The Best and the Brightest,” that war was in some ways the creation of a coterie of academics and intellectuals around President John F. Kennedy who, in Mr. Halberstam’s phrase, crafted “brilliant policies that defied common sense.” The same has been said about the neoconservatives around President George W. Bush in the 2003 Iraq War.

Yet in part because of the failures in Vietnam and Iraq, there has also been a countercurrent of skepticism in the policy establishment in recent years.

Resisting retreat

The military brass does seem instinctively inclined to resist any notion of retreat. But retired Army Gen. H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national security adviser until April last year, wrote a seminal book as well. Called “Dereliction of Duty,” it criticized top members of the military for failing to challenge President Lyndon Johnson on his strategy as the Vietnam quagmire deepened. In the run-up to Iraq, it was Secretary of State Colin Powell, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who raised the central argument against the war: the challenges of a post-invasion Iraq. “You break it,” he reportedly told the president, “you own it.”

In my years covering members of the so-called policy establishment as a foreign correspondent, I found that many viewed their main role as providing what Halberstam said was missing in Vietnam: common sense.

Michael Dwyer/AP

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D) of Massachusetts speaks during an organizing event at Manchester Community College in Manchester, N.H., Jan.12, 2019.

That’s certainly true of Afghanistan and Syria. When America first intervened, after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, not just the experts but the country was in no mood to question. Eighteen years later, I don’t know a single policy-establishment figure who thinks the war is winnable. But some do raise a question a bit like the flip side of Mr. Powell’s. With the Taliban in the ascendancy, and groups like Islamic State (ISIS) and Al Qaeda there, too, what might come next if the US withdraws?

In Syria, the US has only 2,200 special-forces troops, alongside a far larger contingent of Kurdish fighters against ISIS. Russia and Iran are the dominant forces. Yet the US presence has meant they haven’t had completely free rein. Nor has Turkey, which has vowed to attack the Americans’ Kurdish allies. Some policy experts are also concerned a withdrawal would leave Israeli military action, with the risk of wider conflict, as the only counterweight to an Iranian military “land bridge” from Tehran, through Iraq, to Lebanon on the Mediterranean.

None of that means withdrawals are necessarily wrong. Senator Warren has raised a question long frustrating the policy establishment itself. She said that those in the defense establishment who kept saying “no, no, no, we can’t do that” in response to calls for withdrawals needed “to explain what they think winning in those wars looks like.”

The problem in both conflicts is that conventional victory is not on offer. The reason for the “no, no no” – or “think carefully before acting” – from some policy professionals is that in today’s world, America's main challenge is not rival armies, but militia or terror groups feeding on instability in failed or embattled states. In that context, they suggest, the question isn’t what winning looks like. It’s the potential costs to US security interests from pulling out altogether.

Syrian Central Military Media/AP

Iran's army chief of staff Maj. Gen. Mohammad Bagheri (l., looking into binoculars) and other senior Iranian officers visit a front line in Syria's northern province of Aleppo in October 2017. The Iranian action film 'Damascus Time' glorifies Iran's military presence in Syria.

The Iranian film “Damascus Time” is an action-packed story of heroes and villains filled, Hollywood-blockbuster-style, with dramatic surprises and explosions.

It’s also loaded with a not-so-subtle political message that steps deeply into Iran’s debate about its military role in Syria.

The movie tells the tale of two pilots with Iranian forces fighting Islamic State (ISIS) jihadists in Syria and “defending” Shiite shrines. Flying a military transport plane out of the besieged city of Palmyra, the pilots take off under fire in a risky, pre-dawn mission to rescue trapped and wounded Syrian civilians – and carry away a handful of ISIS prisoners.

But en route to Damascus, the ISIS prisoners break free and hijack the plane. The portrayal of the Iranian pilots’ ingenuity and bravery – and their eventual foiling of a brutal ISIS effort to kill them all in a live propaganda video feed – is very much art in the service of politics.

While the film easily dramatizes the good-versus-evil fight against ISIS, analysts say Iran’s strategic goals in Syria encompass far more: support for its longtime ally in Damascus, close cooperation with and the securing of supply lines to its Lebanese client Hezbollah, and the creation of a prized front line with its enemy Israel.

On one level, the film offers its domestic viewing audience justification for Iran’s costly and yearslong military interventions in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, and for its policy of “fighting terrorists” abroad to avoid doing so at home.

As the jihadists seize control of the aircraft, for example, the sheikh leader warns: “Everything will [one day] be under the ISIS flag, and we’ll come to Tehran soon.”

But on another level, “Damascus Time” is a prime example of how nearly a decade of systematic efforts by conservative elements in Iran, often linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), have borne fruit in gaining influence in Iran’s cultural and media space.

“At the level of revolutionary activists, after 2009 [pro-democracy street protests] they recognized the danger … that they were too weak in the media – they did not have a single cartoonist,” says a conservative analyst in Tehran who asked not to be named.

“But they have been very successful; they have a lot of cartoonists now, and media and filmmakers,” he says, noting that “Damascus Time” is just one example of the investment in new and more ideological output that aims to reinforce support for Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution and today’s Islamic Republic.

The movie won accolades at Iran’s prestigious Fajr International Film Festival last February – one of several films in the running produced by pro-establishment movie houses like the Owj Arts and Media Organization.

Veteran director Ebrahim Hatamikia – who has been among the vanguard of Iran’s celebrated war cinema since working on the “Revayat-e Fath” (Chronicles of Victory) television series during the 1980s Iran-Iraq War – won best director and other prizes for “Damascus Time.”

He expressed thanks for support from the Owj organization, which is widely recognized as being funded by the IRGC, and said the IRGC Qods Force commander, Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, “wept while watching my movie” and gave him a gift. Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif called the film a “masterpiece.”

‘Find a solution for us’

Not long before the prize was awarded at the festival, Iran had experienced weeks of widespread protests against economic mismanagement, corruption, and high unemployment. Street protests featured chants against Iran’s interventions in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon.

“Leave Syria, find a solution for us!” was one common chant, as protesters torched cars and attacked military bases, and marched in dozens of cities and towns.

In Tehran, a former journalist who was raised in western Iran during the 1980s and felt the impact of the Iran-Iraq War says he is sympathetic to the idea of helping Syria, but understands the protesters.

“Syria was the only one who supported us [during the Iran-Iraq War], so I am not opposed to helping Syria. But how far? That is open to question,” says the former journalist, who asked not to be named. “If we had enough money as before, people wouldn’t care. But now, people feel the pinch.”

Indeed, justifications for Iran’s intervention since the Syria war began in 2011 have evolved, from simply bolstering a strategic ally to battling terrorists.

“They were lucky that ISIS emerged, otherwise they would never convince the middle class that ‘defending the shrine’ was ever a justified cause to spend so much money and blood,” says Hossein Derakhshan, an Iranian researcher at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Mass.

Along the way, Iran’s conservative cultural output has taken on a certain flavor, he says. “They have been so obsessed with the US culture that they unconsciously reproduce Hollywood, celebrity culture, militaristic and imperial tendencies,” Mr. Derakhshan says.

Despite questions on the street about Iran’s foreign interventions, “very, very few people think we should leave Syria,” asserts Hossein Shariatmadari, editor of the hard-line Kayhan newspaper. “Even among that little portion, when you talk to them, they will become convinced when we explain that we are actually paying for our own security in Syria, otherwise we would have been fighting ISIS in Iran.”

Iran’s hard-liners, who often call themselves “principlists” for their adherence to the principles of the revolution, “have realized how important this instrument is … the most important thing to convey messages. Cinema is a very important tool,” says Mr. Shariatmadari.

‘More important than schools’

Investing in media to shape popular perceptions may also be a bargain. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, made this point in an audience with pro-regime media chiefs within the past two years, according to a source with knowledge of the closed-door meeting.

Such a view harks back to the earliest days of the revolution, when its founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, declared that, “of all of the organs of propaganda, radio and television are most important” and “more important than schools.”

That is a lesson the IRGC and Iran’s ideological Basij volunteer militia – which conducts its own classes in how media work – has been learning, as it puts forward its good-versus-evil narrative.

Indeed, Maj. Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari, commander of the IRGC, last year praised Mr. Hatamikia for “Damascus Time,” saying it came at a moment “when the enemy is using all its power to harm the Iranian nation’s faith.”

He said the IRGC “has a responsibility … to aid the link between those fighting for jihad and martyrdom, and activists in the field of arts and culture.”

Despite the enthusiastic embrace of the IRGC and hard-liners, patriotic initiatives in Iranian cinema may have only limited impact, given Iran’s cultural sophistication.

“In this movie you can feel that Iranians can save Syria and defeat terrorists and sacrifice themselves to save innocent people,” says the conservative analyst in Tehran, adding that parts of the storyline meant the film was “not successful in convincing Iranian audiences.”

“This movie can’t help the official narrative because protesters say: ‘Don’t save the world, save us,’ ” he says. “This is a challenge the establishment is still having to cope with.”

Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

Britain’s Andy Murray loses against Spain's Roberto Bautista Agut in the Australian Open in Melbourne Jan. 14. Murray announced his imminent retirement Jan. 11.

My mother has a Union Jack flag that she keeps just inside the front door of her house. It’s old and faded, slightly tattered. My grandmother flew it outside her house on V-E Day in 1945. My mother also puts it out on special occasions – like when Andy Murray won Wimbledon in 2013.

Murray lost in the first round of the Australian Open Monday, in five sets to Spaniard Roberto Bautista Agut, in what may have been his last match. He said last week he hopes to play at Wimbledon one last time.

I’ve never been a chest-thumping patriot, or a tennis fanatic. Wimbledon is special, though – and it had been 76 years. Not even the V-E Day flag had seen a British man win Wimbledon.

But that isn’t what makes Andy Murray perhaps the greatest British athlete of this century. It’s that even at his best, he often wasn’t good enough. And the fact that he may be this century’s greatest British athlete, but just its fourth greatest male tennis player, is just so very British.

Lots of British stereotypes are overblown. America has a higher per capita interest in the royal family, I’d wager, though Brits like the days off for weddings. But the pessimism, often thinly disguised as self-deprecation? The feeling, deep in the bones, that things can always get worse? That is true.

In sports this has manifested as an almost inevitable crumbling under pressure, an innate ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. The England soccer team has long been the chief architect of this phenomenon, but for a long time so were British men at Wimbledon.

Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP/File

Andy Murray kisses the men's singles championship trophy after defeating Novak Djokovic of Serbia at Wimbledon July 7, 2013.

I grew up watching Tim Henman, which is to say I grew up watching him lose in the Wimbledon semifinals every year. Even as it became clear that Murray was much, much better at tennis – reaching four Grand Slam finals and five semifinals between 2008 and 2012, losing each time to either Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal or Novak Djokovic – it was hard to see if even he could do anything to end seven decades of British tennis futility.

Enduring pain without complaint seems to have become core to British identity.

That has been a central theme not only through Murray’s career but through his life. (He was 9, and walking to the gym, when a gunman opened fire at Dunblane Primary School, killing 16 children and one teacher in the deadliest mass shooting in modern British history.)

Early in his career he was seen as brusque, cold,­­­­­­ and angry. He was British in victory and Scottish in defeat. As the Grand Slam final and semifinal losses mounted, so did the pressure. After losing to Federer in the 2012 Wimbledon final, he cried through the post-match interview. Suddenly he wasn’t a tennis robot. He was a human.

“Everybody always talks about the pressure, playing at Wimbledon, how tough it is. But it’s not the people watching, they make it so much easier to play. The support’s been incredible,” he said.

Public opinion turned, and so did his game. A month later he played Federer again, on Wimbledon’s Centre Court again, and beat him to win Olympic gold. Four years of consistent excellence followed. He finished 2016 as the world No. 1.

Jacob Turcotte/Staff

He is the first man to win consecutive Olympic singles golds. Only Fred Perry, the last British man to win Wimbledon, won more Grand Slams in the past 100 years – at a time, as my mother points out, when men played in trousers.

But as impressive as the championships are – the Davis Cup, which Murray won for his team almost single-handed, deserves special mention – the defeats are just as significant. The peak of his career coincided with Djokovic winning a record-equaling six Australian Open titles and a Federer resurgence. A series of deep runs in the clay court French Open ended at the hands of Nadal, probably the greatest clay court player ever.

He was knighted at the end of December 2016 for “services to tennis and charity.” A hip injury in 2017 hampered his performance, despite surgery in January 2018.

“I’ve been in a lot of pain for, well it’s been probably about 20 months now,” he said during an emotional press conference last week.

“I said to my team, ‘Look, I think I can get through this until Wimbledon.’ That’s when I would like to, that’s where I would like to stop playing,” he continued, “but I’m also not certain I’m able to do that.”

The appreciations have poured in since then.

Tennis legend Billie Jean King paid tribute to Murray’s advocacy for equality in tennis.

“You are a champion on and off the court,” King tweeted. “Your greatest impact on the world may be yet to come. Your voice for equality will inspire future generations.”

Murray has said he didn’t give much thought to feminism when he became one of the first top male players to hire a female coach, Amélie Mauresmo, in 2014. But the backlash the appointment provoked made him one. He became an outspoken critic of the gender pay gap in tennis and has repeatedly called out journalists for overlooking the achievements of female players.

At 31, some might think he is calling it quits prematurely. But he never had Federer’s effortless skill, Nadal’s ferocious power, or Djokovic’s potent combination of the two.

Instead, a consensus is emerging that Murray was a human who, in an era of gods, was able to touch the heavens through sheer force of will. His three Grand Slam titles trail, by a distance, Federer (20), Nadal (17), and Djokovic (14) – though he would probably point out that all four of them trail Serena Williams’s 23. To stay in that company, writes Jonathan Liew in The Independent, “perhaps it was no surprise, in retrospect, that he eventually broke himself trying.”

Researching this, I learned that Murray has a long injury history. I knew about the hip trouble, and back pain in 2013. I didn’t know that at 17 he had a serious knee injury he was told would prevent him from playing high-level tennis.

He fought through it, as he did through everything else.

I hope he is able to get the Wimbledon send-off he deserves. I’m sure my grandmother’s flag will be out for it.

AP

A game of internet slots is under way on a free-play site in Atlantic City, N.J.

The Justice Department issued a legal opinion Monday that will provide one more tool for parents to control their teens’ online activity. It might also help the high number of poor people in the United States who lose money on interstate lottery contests. The 23-page opinion simply states that a 1961 federal law, called the Wire Act, does indeed prohibit all internet gambling across state lines.

That opinion reverses one by the Obama Justice Department seven years ago. It will now reinstate federal guardrails as more states move to allow online gambling within their borders or try to expand “mega” lotteries to personal digital devices across the country.

The earlier opinion was issued in 2011 when recession-hit states were seeking new sources of revenue from gambling. It is widely seen as misinterpreting the intent of Congress to contain the ill effects of gambling across state lines with electronic communications. Before 2011, the Justice Department had long applied the 1961 statute to all sorts of gambling.

As some states have since learned, criminal operators and big gambling companies are very difficult to control without federal help. Tech-savvy children anywhere can easily access online sites. And offshore firms are not easy to prosecute.

“States with legalized sports betting simply do not have the resources to prevent their residents from migrating to these illegal offshore sportsbooks and local bookies where the odds are better, bonuses larger, and there’s no worry about reporting winnings to the IRS,” says Jon Bruning, former attorney general of Nebraska.

With the new opinion, Justice officials must decide when states have crossed a line by promoting gambling. Government has a strong stake in protecting the most vulnerable, such as children or problem gamblers. It also should not be in the business of advocating notions of luck as a source of success. A society advances by individual merit, the best ideas, and teamwork.