Articles

The United States can’t overthrow Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, but it shouldn’t prop him up.

The cease-fire agreement between Hezbollah and Israel is being touted by right-wing admirers of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as evidence that Israel can use its superior military power to force its enemies to meet its demands without the kinds of compromises advocated by the supposedly wimpy Biden administration.

Why does President-elect Donald Trump intend to nominate as his defense secretary Pete Hegseth, a 44-year-old Fox News host and former major in the Army National Guard who has no experience running a vast organization like the Defense Department and who is now embroiled in a sexual assault scandal? (He denies wrongdoing in the 2017 incident, and no police charges were filed.)

With little more than two months left in office, President Joe Biden has belatedly heeded Ukraine’s pleas and reportedly allowed the use of American-provided Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) inside Russia. This comes a little more than a week after another post-election decision to allow a small number of U.S. defense contractors to fix U.S.-made weapons systems inside Ukraine, rather than forcing Ukrainians to take their weapons to North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries for repair. All of this calls to mind the anonymous quip—often wrongly attributed to former United Kingdom Prime Minister Winston Churchill—that Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing, but only after exhausting all the other options.

During his first presidential term, Donald Trump appointed a number of generals or retired generals to senior jobs, including Jim Mattis as defense secretary, H.R. McMaster as national security adviser, and John F. Kelly, first as homeland security secretary and then White House chief of staff. Trump, who had avoided military service during the Vietnam War, initially seemed to revel in the aura of martial manliness that they conferred on his administration. He loved calling Mattis “Mad Dog,” a nickname that the cerebral retired Marine general disliked.

During his campaign, President-elect Donald Trump promised, as one of his first orders of business, to end the war in Ukraine. “I will get that settled and fast,” he vowed during his lone debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, adding, “If I’m president-elect, I’ll get it done before even becoming president.” But Trump never outlined a plan for accomplishing that ambitious objective, and now he faces the challenge of making good on his promise.

A female presidential candidate just defeated a Russian-backed male who threatens democracy and has faced corruption charges. Whether or not the Moldovan election result is an augury for the U.S. election, it is undoubtedly good news for the cause of freedom around the world — and bad news for dictators like Vladimir Putin who seek to impose their will on their neighbors.

Israel-Iran hostilities. North Korean troops getting ready to fight Ukraine. Chinese military exercises around Taiwan. Suspected Russian sabotage in Europe, and Russia providing targeting data to the Houthis.

Having killed two of its leading enemies — Hamas’s Yahya Sinwar and Hezbollah’s Hasan Nasrallah — Israel is expanding its military ambitions in the multifront struggle against Iranian proxies. Israel is not only trying to stop Hezbollah from rocketing northern Israel, it is also bombing the group’s financial institutions all over Lebanon to undermine the terrorist organization’s grip on the Lebanese state. Hope is growing, at least in some quarters, that Israel can ultimately defeat Iran and, as a former Mossad chief recently said, “reshape the Middle East.”

A year ago, it was unthinkable for Israel and Iran to be directly attacking each other’s territory. The two countries have carried on a shadow war for years, with Israel targeting Iranian nuclear scientists, Iranian supply convoys in Syria and the like, while Iran sponsored proxy attacks on Israel by Hamas and Hezbollah, among other militant groups. But the two countries refrained from directly bombing each other. Now, what was unthinkable has, alas, become routine.

American voters tend be pretty parochial in their approach to elections, focusing on domestic issues above all. I’m not sure if enough of them are fully aware of the stakes in this presidential election. The choice between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump is a referendum not only on America’s future but also on the entire world’s.

Little more than a year ago, on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel suffered arguably the second-biggest intelligence and military failure in its history (after the 1973 Yom Kippur War). Hamas terrorists invaded Israel, killing approximately 1,200 people and kidnapping at least 25o more. Israel had never looked weaker or more vulnerable.

Drones, particularly aerial drones (or what the U.S. military calls “unmanned aerial systems”), are all the rage in warfare. Hailed as the new wonder weapon of the 21st century, they are employed in combat by Ukraine and Russia, and by Israel and Hezbollah. Drones conduct surveillance missions (making it almost impossible for ground forces to advance undetected) and strike missions — either by doing an explosives-laden kamikaze dive at a target or by firing a missile or dropping a bomb. And drones are so cheap and widely available that any armed group in the world can now field its own air force — or its own navy. Ukraine, lacking a conventional navy of its own, used sea drones to disable at least a third of the Russian Black Sea Fleet and reopen the Black Sea to Ukrainian exports.

No one should shed any tears over the death of Hasan Nasrallah, the longtime leader of Hezbollah, in an Israeli airstrike Friday. He was a terrorist kingpin with the deaths of countless innocents — including Israelis, Americans, Syrians and fellow Lebanese — on his hands. His demise was, as President Joe Biden said, “a measure of justice for his many victims.”

In his first-ever bid for political office, former actor Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California in 1966, defeating two-term incumbent Gov. Pat Brown in a landslide. There was good reason for Democrats to fear that a radical right-winger had taken control of what even then was the nation’s most populous state.

If you want to see how nations can stumble into wars without end, the ongoing (and rapidly escalating) conflict between Israel and Hezbollah provides a textbook example. Ever since Hamas’s brutal Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed terrorist organization based in Lebanon, has been showing support for its partners in the “axis of resistance” with relentless rocket and drone fire into northern Israel. About 60,000 Israelis were forced to evacuate their homes and still have not been able to come back, even with a new school year beginning. One particularly gruesome Hezbollah rocket attack killed 12 children in the Golan Heights.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is visiting the United States this week — culminating in a Thursday meeting at the White House with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris — with his country facing a crucial period in its battle to repel Russian invaders.

People have been waging organized warfare ever since the dawn of civilization in ancient Mesopotamia — mostly modern-day Iraq — more than 6,000 years ago. Never in that time, however, has any military force experienced what Hezbollah has seen during the past few days. On Tuesday, thousands of pagers used by the Lebanese terrorist organization exploded, killing at least 12 people and injuring nearly 3,000. On Wednesday, more electronic devices belonging to Hezbollah — this time, reportedly, including handheld radios, a.k.a. walkie-talkies — also exploded, killing at least nine people and injuring at least 300 others.

When it comes to the role of commander in chief, U.S. voters face a choice in November between someone who has done the job and someone who hasn’t. Normally this would be an area where experience trumps, so to speak, inexperience. But Tuesday night’s presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump showed why Harris is actually a much safer bet on national security policy. That’s the case even though Harris has been only an adviser, not the actual decision-maker — and, as far as an outsider can tell, not a particularly influential one.

Remember the Islamic State? The vicious terrorist group took advantage of the outbreak of the Syrian civil war and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011 to stage a major offensive across both countries. By the end of 2014, it controlled roughly 30 percent of Syria and 40 percent of Iraq and was carrying out horrifying massacres and atrocities. The Obama administration committed U.S. air power and advisers to help the Iraqi military and Syrian Democratic Forces (mainly Kurds) battle back. By 2019, ISIS’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had been killed in a U.S. raid, its last redoubts had fallen and then-President Donald Trump claimed “100 percent” success in the anti-ISIS campaign.