Israel Fires Back, But Will It Be Enough?
Israel Fires Back, But Will It Be Enough?
At State Department, employees urge for Israel to be punished
Israeli fighter jets fired several missiles at an air defence installation protecting an Iranian nuclear facility during Friday morning’s attack, a senior US official said.
The salvo was launched from outside of Iranian territory and aimed at a radar site near the central city of Isfahan that is tasked with protecting the Natanz nuclear complex, according to the unnamed official cited by ABC news.
The official described it as an Israeli attempt to display its capability to strike Iran without escalating the situation.
An initial assessment of the strike stated that the air defence station had been destroyed, the official said, while adding that the report had yet to be finalised.
The Natanz complex is reported to be Iran’s primary uranium enrichment facility.
G7 leaders urged restraint from both Israel and Iran following the attack, with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak calling for “calm heads to prevail”.
Tehran meanwhile sought to play down the extent of the strike, with foreign minister Hossein Amirabdollahian saying it caused no damage or casualties in Isfahan. Iran has indicated it has no plans for retaliation. Israel has made no public comment on the incident.
As Israel maintained official silence on Friday’s retaliatory attack on Iran, its analysts and officials weighed in on whether the scale of the assault was a sign of strength or weakness.
“Iran must understand that when it acts against us, we have the ability to strike at any time, and we can do serious damage,” Eyal Hulata, a former national security adviser, said on Army Radio, shortly after reports emerged that Israel had attacked targets in the Iranian city of Isfahan. “We have a highly capable air force, and the United States is on our side.”
“Weak,” tweeted Itamar Ben Gvir, the hard-right national security minister in the cabinet of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He’s been calling all week for a crushing retaliation to the hundreds of missiles and drones that Iran launched at Israeli targets last weekend, almost all of which were intercepted.
Isfahan has several military bases and facilities and is believed to have been one of several launch sites for Iran’s attack on Israel on Saturday night. Two US officials confirmed Israel was behind the attack. The Israeli government told officials and embassies not to confirm or discuss the strike, a fairly common practice, according to Israeli officials. Iranian state media confirmed an attack by Israel involving drones, saying the operation had failed and caused no damage.
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The Speaker Gambles on Himself
Mike Johnson opposed Ukraine aid, now is risking his job for it.
House Speaker Mike Johnson finally made his big decision.
For months, he had resisted putting a fresh round of funds for Ukraine on the House floor, saying that money for Kyiv depended on focusing on lethal aid and enacting policies to secure America’s border. But this week, he announced plans to put about $60 billion for the war-ravaged country up for a vote despite fierce pushback from some Republicans, and on Wednesday decided to stick with it.
“My philosophy is you do the right thing and you let the chips fall where they may,” Johnson told reporters on Wednesday when asked about the perils to his political future. “History judges us for what we do. This is a critical time right now, a critical time on the world stage.”
The Ukraine funding is part of a broader package including aid to Israel and Taiwan, as well as a TikTok crackdown, that is set to get a final vote in the House on Saturday. With his historically thin margin, now 218-213, Johnson will likely have to rely heavily on Democratic votes, both to get the measure through procedural hurdles and on final passage. If approved, it would then head to the Senate.
In an initial step Thursday night that underscored Johnson’s challenges, the House Rules Committee voted 9-3 on the rule for the legislation, relying on support from Democrats to overcome three Republican defections.
The votes ahead will be critical, and they will all have to rely on Democrats to overcome Republican objectors. He’s already receiving praise for “breaking with MAGA” which, given that Trump still seems to back him, doesn’t appear to be the case. But that won’t be the end of it for those who want to redefine what MAGA means…
J.D. Vance’s Plan to Block Ukraine Aid
In place of the rules-based international order, Vance thinks the U.S. needs to chart a new, more nationalistic system where individual nations are solely responsible for their own security and economic well-being, and more insulated from global economic and military entanglements. According to Vance, the first step toward nudging the world in that direction is ending U.S. aid to Ukraine — which, as became clear this week, depends on convincing his Republican colleagues in the House to kill Johnson’s foreign aid package.
Vance has marshaled several different arguments against additional U.S. aid to Ukraine, prompting his opponents in both parties to argue that he’s merely carrying water for Vladimir Putin and other authoritarian leaders. (Vance has, of course, pushed back against this characterization.)
When it comes to the specifics of the Ukraine bill, Vance has been pushing three main objections. In his New York Times op-ed last week, Vance argued that the current aid package — which would provide an additional $60 billion to Ukraine — would do little to shift the war in Ukraine’s favor. (Supporters of the current aid package have challenged this claim.) Vance also argues that the U.S. lacks the manufacturing capacity to produce the volume of weapons that Ukraine would need to win the war.
His last, and most explicitly partisan, objection stems from his preparations for Trump’s possible return to the White House next year. Vance has objected to a component of Johnson’s aid package — which proposes seizing Russian assets under the REPO Act and freezing the current sanction regime against Russia in place — on the grounds that it would tie a second-term Trump’s hands in his negotiations with Russia. This isn’t the first time that Vance has objected to Ukraine aid by invoking Trump, either. In February, when the Senate was debating its own version of the aid package, Vance told his colleagues that locking spending levels in place could create a hidden mechanism for Democrats to impeach Trump in his second term.
Yet Vance’s efforts this week to persuade his Republican colleagues in the House of these specific objections are, in many respects, secondary to his broader goal of shifting the Republican paradigm on foreign policy. As Vance explained to me during our conversations, this larger project goes beyond injecting some “realism” — or, as his critics would call it, “isolationism” — into the foreign policy debates on the right. In a more expansive sense, Vance sees the debate over Ukraine aid as a proxy for the debate over the direction of what he openly calls “the American empire” — and, by extension, of America as a whole.
Newt’s Advice to Johnson
“You can’t govern by shooting yourself in the head every day.”
You tweeted the other day that Speaker Johnson is “working to lead the most complicated House since the Civil War.” That’s a pretty bold claim. What makes his job uniquely hard?
Well, he has the narrowest majority in modern times, and it’s not a true majority, because he’s got six or eight narcissists — people who think that they individually get to screw up everything.
Do you want to name any names?
I think they self-define. I’d start with [Matt] Gaetz, but I would say the list goes on. He’s the super narcissist.
So first of all, he doesn’t have a real majority. He has a technical majority for the purpose of organizing committees and theoretically controlling the flow of legislation, but he doesn’t have a working majority on the Rules Committee. He doesn’t have an ability to deliver 218 votes for virtually anything. He has 30 or 40 members who ideologically wake up every morning knowing that they’re gonna vote no — they’re not sure what the issue is, but they know they’re going to vote no. And then he’s got this last 30 or 40 [members] who need to do something to go on TV and send out fundraising emails, and they don’t frankly care if they screw up our party or the country, if that’s what it takes for them to be so important. So he has an enormously complicated job.
How would you rate his handling of the situation?
I think, actually, he’s doing a pretty decent job considering how almost impossible it is.
He’s patient, he’s calm, he is trying to understand whether or not there are paths that might work, and trying to come up with formulas that enable him to get something out of the House. Frankly, the danger for the hard right is that if they teach 120 or 130 members that the only way to get anything done is to work with the Democrats, they’ll end up with much worse legislation than they would get if they would actually work as a team. So it’s a real challenge, I think, and I’m watching what he’s doing and I have great sympathy for how hard his job is.
But back in the ’70s, you famously said, “One of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage people to be nasty.” Do you think Johnson is nasty enough to be speaker?
I think you have to take situations in their historical context. In the 1970s, we had a Republican Party that was in the minority — and would remain in the minority for a total of 40 years — that was unable to go to the floor to debate and that was able to stand up to the left. You needed people who were tough and who were willing to take on Tip O’Neill or Jim Wright or the entire left wing of the Democratic Party. In that sense, Trump is sort of a prototype of that kind of approach. He’s tough enough to stand and fight, not just limply hide in the corner.
The challenge you have once you have the majority is that you want to be positive and get something done — and the country expects you to get something done. So that’s why I think this is a real challenge. The demons that Gaetz unleashed by going after [Kevin] McCarthy are still out there. You can’t govern by shooting yourself in the head every day.
So it’s fair to say you think it would be a mistake if members moved forward with the motion to vacate?
It would be totally stupid. My question would be, “Show me the 218 you’ve got for somebody,” because otherwise what you’re doing is putting us through three weeks of looking like idiots — which Gaetz managed to do. It was bad enough that it took 15 ballots for McCarthy to finally win. But to then turn and destroy his speakership, throwing the entire party and the entire House into [chaos] …
You’ve got to remember, this isn’t some game at a PTA meeting. This is the House of Representatives. It has serious constitutional obligations. We live in a dangerous world, and we look like we are absurdly incapable of governing ourselves.
Feature
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Items of Interest
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Domestic
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McCarthy group is running ads against GOPers, particularly Mace.
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Lessons from the Mayorkas impeachment and dismissal.
The Obama Library debacle continues on.
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Lawfare
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Hunter Biden heads to appeals court.
2024
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Tech
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Ephemera
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Quote
“The substance of all such paganism may be summarized thus. It is an attempt to reach the divine reality through the imagination alone; in its own field reason does not restrain it at all... There is nothing in Paganism whereby one may check his own exaggerations… The objection to Natural Religion is that somehow it always becomes unnatural. A man loves Nature in the morning for her innocence and amiability, and at nightfall, if he is loving her still, it is for her darkness and her cruelty. He washes at dawn in clear water as did the Wise Man of the Stoics, yet, somehow at the dark end of the day, he is bathing in hot bull’s blood, as did Julian the Apostate.”
— G.K. Chesterton