Joined by Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, Biden hopes to “advance a shared trilateral vision” in the Indo-Pacific and beyond. Aspirations for the summit are high, but whether the leaders are truly prepared for effective trilateral teamwork, or whether Friday is just another meeting on their busy schedules, is unclear.
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Ukraine’s spring offensive, now well into the summer, isn’t making the headway some proponents had forecast. The Ukrainians aren’t lacking in bravery or tenacity, and they’ve achieved eye-catching successes, such as the recent crippling of Russia’s Olenegorsky Gornyak, a roll-on/roll-off landing ship. Nevertheless, it should be a wake-up call for Washington that its strategy needs reformulating.
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Donald Trump’s continued pursuit of the 2024 Republican presidential nomination will damage both the party and America, particularly if he succeeds. Neutral observers might think the growing mountain of legal challenges — criminal and civil — including the one filed Tuesday in Washington, would give Trump pause, notwithstanding his current opinion-poll lead in the Republican race. And everyone not named Trump recognises the enormous risks if he becomes the first convicted felon nominated for the presidency, or worse yet elected president.
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The Republican Party could well nominate a convicted felon for president in 2024, given the interplay between Donald Trump’s burgeoning criminal-trial docket and the party’s presidential-selection schedule. Still worse for the country, the felon might actually be elected, despite his prior Oval Office record proving him unfit to set national security policy.
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For both America and Israel, President Joe Biden was wrong to intervene in the contentious debate over Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s proposed judicial reforms.
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NATO leaders meeting in Vilnius, Lithuania, this week have a full agenda of issues critical to the alliance’s future, notably Russia’s continuing war in Ukraine. That war’s outcome, however, affects all now-independent states of the former Soviet Union, perhaps none more directly than Moldova.
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The potential of significant Chinese facilities in Cuba is a red-flag threat to America. After the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, Washington relied on an “implicit understanding” (in Henry Kissinger’s words) with Moscow to reduce threats emanating from Cuba.
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Demonstrating yet again that it’s little more than Barack Obama’s third term, the Biden White House is once more pressing to rejoin the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. This ill-advised gambit will cost about $600 million, apparently just a rounding error for the administration’s budgeteers.
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“Wokeness” covers a broad category of bad ideas, but the most pernicious, in my view, is the deindividuation of America’s citizenry, identifying them not as themselves but as members of groups based on race, ethnicity, and gender. This self-described “identity politics” is fundamentally contrary to the concept of individual liberty, which rests on the proposition that every American citizen is uniqu
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Iran is steadily eviscerating the political and economic constraints the U.S. has marshalled against it. Tehran’s unprecedented coordination with the Beijing-Moscow axis has converged with President Biden’s apparent disdain for key Middle East allies, his obsession with reviving the 2015 nuclear deal and his lax sanctions enforcement. We now face geostrategic realignment and instability in the region as well as more terrorism and nuclear proliferation around the world.
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