Will Israel Convince Trump To Go All The Way?
Or will he balk if the war gets more difficult?
The conventional wisdom in Washington holds that the United States and Israel share a unified strategic interest in confronting Iran. Politicians on both sides of the aisle recite it like a catechism. The think tanks reinforce it. The defense establishment operationalizes it. But conventional wisdom, particularly in the Middle East, has a remarkable track record of being wrong—and this case is no exception.
Let us be precise about what each party actually wants, because imprecision in foreign policy is not only the cause of intellectual failure but also the expense of blood and treasure.
What Israel wants is the elimination—not the containment, not the negotiated limitation—of Iran’s nuclear program and, increasingly, the weakening or collapse of the Islamic Republic itself. For Israel, this is existential calculus. A nuclear-armed Iran, in the Israeli strategic mind, represents an intolerable threat to its physical survival. Israeli leaders have said this clearly and repeatedly, and there is no reason to doubt their sincerity. They want the United States to fight this war fully, decisively, and at whatever cost is required to finish the job.
What the United States wants—or rather, what American interests dictate, as distinct from what American politicians say—is considerably more modest and considerably more complicated. Washington wants to prevent Iran from acquiring a deliverable nuclear weapon. It wants to preserve the flow of Persian Gulf oil. It wants to avoid another open-ended Middle Eastern military commitment that hollows out its conventional deterrence posture in the Indo-Pacific. It wants to keep the global economy from absorbing an oil-price shock that accelerates its own fragmentation. And it wants, if possible, to get back to the business of managing its rivalry with China—the actual defining challenge of this century.
These are obviously not the same objectives. They overlap in places, but they diverge precisely where the pressure is greatest—the question of how far to go.
The National Interest: Is the Iran War an Asset or Liability for Russia?
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Abortion Supporters Changed Their Tactics — So Should Pro-Lifers
Josh Hawley in The Daily Wire:
When the Supreme Court finally overturned Roe v. Wade — reversing the worst Supreme Court decision since Dred Scott — pro-life Americans rejoiced. Little did we know the fight was only just beginning. Since then, abortion advocates have dumped millions of dollars in dark money into our states to overturn state laws, and in some cases, state constitutional provisions, protecting life. They’ve relentlessly pushed for pro-abortion judges for state courts and the federal judiciary. But above all, they’ve turned to a drug called mifepristone to bring abortion on demand to every state in the union. If pro-lifers want to protect the innocent unborn, and the health and safety of women, there’s only one thing to do: ban the chemical abortion drug.
