President Joe Biden’s actions over many months suggest that Israel can determine when and where the United States goes to war in the Middle East. That is unacceptable, and the next American president must change this dynamic.
In one framing, the past 12 months have witnessed a remarkable display of America’s might and resolve in the Middle East—especially relative to our principal adversary in the region, Iran.
Israel said this afternoon that it had carried out an air strike on the “central headquarters” of Hezbollah, in the southern suburbs of Beirut. Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah was reportedly the target of the attack; his fate remains unclear.
The strike caps a sequence of Israeli attacks over the past two weeks that have wreaked havoc on Hezbollah as an organization. The pager and walkie-talkie attacks that began on September 17—which former U.S.
Israeli forces are killing thousands of innocent civilians and badly damaging their country’s standing with its most important partners, including the United States. Israel has also no doubt severely degraded Hamas’s military capabilities, but the question needs to be asked: Is the country’s furious response to the Hamas invasion of October 7 making Israel any safer? At best, it’s still too soon to say—but on balance, what I see worries me.
We are a month into Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza. The ferocity of Israel’s response to the murder of more than 1,400 Israeli citizens has been such that international concern for the Palestinians of Gaza—half of whom, or more than 1 million, are children under the age of 15—has now largely eclipsed any sympathy that might have been felt for the victims of the crimes that precipitated the war in the first place.
Thirty years ago today, the U.S. military was involved in a brief but brutal battle in Somalia. In a series of firefights over two bloody days, 18 members of America’s most elite Special Forces and hundreds of Somali militiamen were killed. This was the Battle of Mogadishu, which the journalist Mark Bowden (now an Atlantic contributing writer) famously reported for The Philadelphia Inquirer and later adapted as the book and the film Black Hawk Down.
Over the past several weeks, Israeli and American officials have teased a possible deal to normalize relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Such an agreement has the potential to be a diplomatic triumph: Successive U.S. administrations, going back decades and from both parties, have considered the security of both Israel and the Arabian Peninsula to be vital interests that Americans would fight and die for if necessary.
I regret to inform you that Joe Biden is right to go to Saudi Arabia.Biden’s planned visit to the kingdom represents a determination to both rationalize the amount of attention we pay to the region and formulate a foreign policy that works on behalf of the American middle class. But it is not going to make anyone happy in the near term, and it is going to cost him precious political capital with his own party.
We’ve likely reached the high-water mark of the grand alliance to defeat Russia in Ukraine. In the coming months, relations between the Ukrainian leadership and its external supporters will grow strained, and the culprit will be economic pain exacerbated by the war.
The most important thing you need to know about yesterday’s tragic school shooting in Texas is that absolutely no laws are going to change as a result of it.In the 14 years since the Supreme Court found an individual right to bear arms under the Second Amendment in the landmark case of D.C. v. Heller, the federal judiciary has only grown more conservative. The courts will likely bar any meaningful restrictions on the possession of firearms for at least another generation.
The great winter storm of 2021 has terrorized Texans, overwhelmed our energy grid, and made a mockery of our politicians and our much-vaunted independence.Here in Dallas, my family and I have intermittently been without power for three days. On Monday night, the coldest night on record in three decades, we were without power for 12 long hours.