Displaying the most recent of 90914 posts written by

Ruth King

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Vaccination Weaponization The Biden Administration should look in the mirror before casting stones at others. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on August 5th, 2021

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/04/vaccination-weaponization/

 It was always going to be Herculean to inoculate, with an untried vaccine, a multi-ethnic nation of 330 million, across a vast continent—in an era when the media routinely warps the daily news. 

Some minorities understandably harbored distrust of prior government vaccination programs. 

Nearly 40 million foreign residents in America are from countries where corrupt governments had long ago lost the trust of the population. 

The anti-vaccination movement was distrustful of what the government said was safe—given the rush to produce previously untried mRNA inoculation methodologies. 

Rural and inner-city poor were sometimes not so easily reached, much less persuaded. 

Yet politics played the most obstructive role early on. Candidate Joe Biden talked grandly of reviving the World War II war production board. He deliberately omitted that it was Donald Trump who emulated FDR’s mobilization of private enterprise under government auspices. 

Trump offered legal protections for companies to accelerate their research and development—in hopes that competition, profits, and public oversight would result in COVID-19 vaccinations just 10 months after the pandemic hit. 

And it worked. Mostly safe and effective vaccinations were rolled out shortly after the election. Some 17 million were inoculated by the time of Joe Biden’s January 20 inauguration. 

Yet Dr. Anthony Fauci, in the days when he still posed as a bipartisan professional, had dismissed the idea of any viable vaccination in the election year 2020. Joe Biden publicly doubted that Trump’s vaccination efforts would either work or be safe. 

In a nationally televised debate, vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris shamefully said she would never be vaxxed with any shot associated with President Trump. All that proved disastrous messaging for an already skeptical nation. 

Pfizer had promised a breakthrough vaccination announcement in late October on the eve of the election. Then it mysteriously went silent—only to suddenly announce its successful  vaccination, just a few days after the November 3 voting. 

Joe Biden continued the politicization of the vaccination program by bizarrely and falsely declaring on CNN that there had been no vaccinations given until he entered office. Yet Biden himself was first vaccinated on December 21 on live television. 

Soon Biden grandly promised that all those who were vaccinated would be safe from infection from the SARS‑CoV‑2 virus. And thus they could resume normal lives without masks, quarantines, or social distancing. 

Continue reading →
ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel’s Place in the New Order: A Practitioner’s Perspective by Yaakov Amidror

By on August 5th, 2021

https://jstribune.com/yaakov-amidror-israels-place-in-new-world-order/

The world Israel lives in is dramatically different from the one in which our elders grew up, amid Cold War tensions and with large Arab armies at Israel’s borders. Within the last decade we witnessed the rise of China, America’s announced intention to reduce its presence in the Middle East, the aggressiveness of a weakened but assertive Russia, and the consequences of turmoil in the Middle East. We are faced with multiple threats, including a shifting balance of power in Asia and an increasingly lawless global system—scarred by the failure of globalization during the COVID-19 crisis. Amid all this, it is imperative that Israel sustain its own strength, while working hard to restore bipartisan support in the United States and making good use of the new alignments in the Eastern Mediterranean and with like-minded Sunni Arab nations.

A World of Difference

How different is the world we live in from that which we have been raised to expect? To answer this question we need to define the relevant timeframe discussed in this essay. Clearly this is a world radically different from the one in which I came of age and learned my trade as an intelligence officer—the post-1945 world in which two overly armed nuclear powers, the US and the Soviet Union, faced each other in deadly competition across the globe (with a block of the “non-aligned” trying, not always successfully, to stay on the sidelines); and the post-1948 world in which Israel faced the threat of enemy Arab states surrounding it with a million armed men, thousands of tanks, and hundreds of fighter aircraft.

Since then, the Soviet Union has fallen apart and in our region, no Arab army (other than the Egyptian military) is large or significant enough to constitute a threat. But to better understand the world in which Israel must function, the changes—globally as well as regionally—within the last decade provide the relevant frame of analysis. This has been a decade in which the global distribution of power became much more evident, in light of several developments:

Eight years of rule—now set to be extended indefinitely—by Xi Jinping in China, under whose leadership the People’s Republic of China pursues a strategy of aggressive growth. It is already America’s peer rival, as it seeks a revision of the global order; this, in turn, has set in motion drastic changes in the global alignments and alliances.

The return of the Democrats to power in both branches of government in the US and the ensuing debate (and internal fissures) on aspects of policy—including the “special relationship” with Israel—amid signs of radical polarization, leading the US away from the traditional role it is expected to play in the region and beyond.

The willingness and ability of Russia, despite demographic decline and severe economic limitations, to play an outsized role due to its readiness to use force, led by an assertive president and backed by an impressive and intimidating nuclear arsenal.

The dramatic and confusing events of the so-called Arab Spring, which brought about the disintegration of several states. It is now evident that the non-Arab powers—Iran, Turkey, and Israel—are the tone-setters in a region once viewed as the heartland of Arab nationalism.

Looking toward the future, five key cycles of dynamic changes seem to have a transformative role and need to be addressed by policy makers.

The Chinese Challenge

China is fast becoming the dynamic revisionist power in the global order—deliberately and rather aggressively expanding its circle of influence. It does not fear competing with the US; rather, it seeks to pose the Chinese model as an alternative to Western democracy and pushes for structural change in any international organization and forum it is part of, or uses existing organizations to implement its own interests. It has become more centralized and utilizes modern technology to tighten its grip on its citizens; hence, its overt self-confidence is evident as Xi rewrites the rules that have held for the last 30 years.

Additionally, the People’s Republic of China did not recoil from the use of force to impose its will on Hong Kong and integrate it within the Chinese system, in breach of the understanding reached with the United Kingdom as to the rights of the former colony. Nor did it hesitate to threaten Australia, to take over atolls and uninhabited islands within the so-called Nine-Dash Map, build military bases, and revive nationalist claims from the 1930s, and to do so in dangerous proximity to other nations in the South China Sea, which have competing claims over the same locations.

Continue reading →
ISRAEL Comments turned off

Moral Anorexia in the Cognitive War Against Israel Meet the virtue-signaling progressives who promote lies about the Jewish state. Richard L. Cravatts

By on August 5th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/moral-anorexia-cognitive-war-against-israel-richard-l-cravatts/

The cognitive war against Israel, which has continued almost unabated since the Jewish state’s founding, intensifies after specific events on the ground, as happened in May during Israel’s latest incursion into Gaza to suppress homicidal rocket fire from Hamas terrorists. When more than 3000 rockets were fired indiscriminately into southern Israeli towns by Hamas with the express purpose of murdering Jewish civilians there was, of course, an almost universal silence; only when Israel, in its necessary self-defense, finally moved to neutralize terrorist enclaves and stop the deadly rocket fire did academics, NGOs, unions, and the other reliably anti-Israel entities rise up in a collective denunciation of the Jewish state, howling about Israel’s malign behavior.

Perennially unhappy with the very existence of Israel, anti-Israel activists and scolds use any escalation in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict to renew their incessant, obsessive criticism of Israel, ignoring the existential threat Israel faces from homicidal psychopaths dedicated to the murder of its citizens and focusing instead of mendacious claims of colonialism, genocide, ethnic cleansing, asymmetrical warfare, disproportionate force, land theft, illegality, apartheid and unredeemable and intolerable racism on the part of Jewish extremist settlers occupying an indigenous people’s land.

Even corporations got into the act, the latest being the shameful boycott launched in the so-called “occupied territories,” Judea and Samaria, by Ben & Jerry’s, the eponymous ice cream company created by two Vermont leftists.

Trumpeting the virtue-signaling rationale for their corporate decision to defame the Jewish state in a New York Times op-ed, “Men of Ice Cream, Men of Principle,” the two founders, Bennett Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, claimed they “took the step to align its business and operations with its progressive values” and that they “believe this act can and should be seen as advancing the concepts of justice and human rights . . ,” although like their fellow travelers in the social justice left, it is never clear how, in this case, anyone’s human rights or equality will be enhanced or protected by being deprived of eating ice cream.

In fact, like all social justice warriors, Ben and Jerry make the same hypocritical error that all progressives do when they purported seek justice and equality for the oppressed; namely, they care nothing for any other parties involved—in this case, Israelis who live in the biblical areas of Judea and Samaria, carelessly referred to as the West Bank.

In the Manichean view of the world embraced by leftists, oppressors deserve no protection and will not be insulated from harm when social justice for the oppressed is achieved—even if that involves resistance, violence, insurrection, military conflict, revolution, and the overthrow of the prevailing order. Social justice does not imply or necessitate justice for all parties, only the oppressed victims. In the case of the Palestinians and Israelis, groups such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) seek justice in the Holy Land, but only for the so-called Palestinians, not for Israelis. If the creation of a new Palestinian state entails the extirpation of the Jewish one, so be it.

The rectitude of academics or corporate heads pushing for condemnations of Israel manifests itself as what has been termed “moral narcissism,” the tendency of members of the well-meaning, intellectual elite to align with causes and ideological positions which are based, not on the actual viability or justice of a cause, but on how the moral narcissist feels about him- or herself by committing to a particular cause or movement.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Opposition to vaccination passports comes from an unexpected quarter By Andrea Widburg

By on August 5th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/opposition_to_vaccination_passports_comes_from_an_unexpected_quarter.html

The Democrats, for much of the 20th century, represented the American working class. However, they built their latest political empire by targeting myriad special interest groups: Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, LGBTQs, Muslims, Jews, the handicapped, etc., in addition to the reliable college-educated, White voters. Despite Democrats’ paeans to diversity, though, the coalition’s disparate members often dislike each other. That schism is showing as Blacks and Hispanics realize that the vaccine passports that White Democrats are urging damage their communities. Boston’s mayor, though, is pushing back.

It’s unquestionable that both Blacks and Hispanics have been resistant to the vaccine:

“No, Black people, there is no white supremacist scheme behind the COVID vaccine”
“CDC: Blacks and Hispanics still least likely to be vaccinated”
“US Black and Latino communities often have low vaccination rates – but blaming vaccine hesitancy misses the mark”
“Young Latino and Black people have the lowest rate of COVID-19 vaccination in L.A. County, new data show”

Given their consistent unwillingness to subject themselves to the vaccine, it will have a profound effect on Blacks and Hispanics that Democrat politicians and political bodies (mostly White), on the one hand, and corporations (mostly White-managed), on the other hand, are working together to demand vaccine passports to function in the modern world.

In New York, Bill de Blasio is requiring a vaccine passport for New Yorkers who want to eat inside restaurants (as opposed to on the street with the crazy homeless), attend performances, or go to the gym. Timothy Carney has rightly pointed out that this will create an illegal disparate impact:

Here’s where it gets hairy: There are great racial disparities in vaccination rates in New York City, which means there will be a hugely disparate impact from de Blasio’s rules.

More than 47% of white New Yorkers are vaccinated, according to Bloomberg’s tracker, compared to 33% of black New Yorkers and just under 45% of Hispanics in the city.

That means that black New Yorkers will be barred from public accommodations at a far higher rate than will white New Yorkers. This is kind of an awkward policy.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Eradication of Covid Is a Dangerous and Expensive Fantasy It seemed to work in New Zealand and Australia, but now ruinous, oppressive lockdowns are back. By Jay Bhattacharya and Donald J. Boudreaux

By on August 5th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/zero-covid-coronavirus-pandemic-lockdowns-china-australia-new-zealand-11628101945?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Dr. Bhattacharya is a professor of medicine at Stanford and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Mr. Boudreaux is a professor of economics at George Mason University.

Much of the pathology underlying Covid policy arises from the fantasy that it is possible to eradicate the virus. Capitalizing on pandemic panic, governments and compliant media have used the lure of zero-Covid to induce obedience to harsh and arbitrary lockdown policies and associated violations of civil liberties.

Among all countries, New Zealand, Australia and especially China have most zealously embraced zero-Covid. China’s initial lockdown in Wuhan was the most tyrannical. It infamously locked people into their homes, forced patients to take untested medications, and imposed 40-day quarantines at gunpoint.

On March 24, 2020, New Zealand imposed one of the most onerous lockdowns in the free world, with sharp restrictions on international travel, business closures, a prohibition on going outside, and official encouragement of citizens to snitch on neighbors. In May 2020, having hit zero-Covid, New Zealand lifted lockdown restrictions, except quarantines for international travelers and warrantless house searches to enforce lockdown.

Australia also took the zero-Covid route. While the initial steps focused on banning international travel, the lockdowns there also involved closed schools, occasional separation of mothers from premature newborns, brutal suppression of protests, and arrests for wandering more than 3 miles from home.

New Zealand’s and Australia’s temporary achievement of zero-Covid and China’s claimed success were greeted with fanfare by the media and scientific journals. China’s authoritarian response seemed so successful—despite the country’s record of lying about the virus—that panicked democratic governments around the world copied it. The three countries lifted their lockdowns and celebrated.

Continue reading →
HISTORY, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How Americans Forgot Communism Only those who lived in its shadow seem to be worried about contemporary parallels by Mary Mycio

By on August 5th, 2021

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/communism-mary-mycio

When communism collapsed in Europe 30 years ago, it seemed vanquished. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics turned out to be none of those things and broke into 15 independent countries. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, McDonald’s replaced Marx, and no one argued anymore that real communism still hadn’t been tried.

But old, familiar ideas are making a comeback on both sides of what used to be a great ideological divide. In Russia, Josef Stalin’s approval rating recently reached an all-time high. Meanwhile, American millennials’ stated approval of communism and socialism has been steadily rising in polls. After the fascism panic of Donald Trump’s presidency, driven and capitalized on by the media and publishing industries, it’s not surprising that the American left often sees historical evil even in ordinary populism. That the 20th century’s other murderous totalitarianism is gaining popularity in response, however, is alarming.

Some attribute this trend to the failures of capitalism after the Great Recession, which gave rise to the popularity of Sen. Bernie Sanders and his own brand of socialism, which he claims to be like Denmark’s (which isn’t actually socialist). Another reason may be that the United States simply hasn’t had a communism panic for more than a generation. And why should it? Who cares about a defeated adversary? After 1991, the Reds weren’t coming for anyone. Then again, Nazis haven’t enjoyed a reputational bounce back since their defeat the way the Soviets have. There is no Godwin’s law for Stalin.

A better explanation is that Americans and others across the West have simply forgotten about it all, or never learned about it in the first place: the Soviet dictators, the purges and terror, the dissidents and refuseniks, the gulags and famines and genocides, the millions shot, starved, worked, and frozen to death. All of it hardly exists in our common imagination. Most Americans have no idea what Soviet communism, which was still around relatively recently, actually looked like.

Communism and Nazism both used state violence to commit mass murder and impose a single ideology on entire populations, but they did it for different reasons. Put simply in contemporary terms, the Nazis imposed inequality to achieve racial supremacy, while the Soviets imposed equality to achieve a universal utopia. Both murdered millions, but the Soviet project naturally found more gullibly receptive audiences abroad over a longer period of time.

To take a relevant metaphor, Americans have a certain herd immunity to Nazism and fascism. The early warning signs have been deeply etched into our psyches with the rich and terrible tapestry of books, movies, and art about the Holocaust. Like T-cells in the immune system, constant exposure to the legacy of fascism is part of our cultural memory. We know what it looks like and where it leads, and we have the antibodies to stave it off. It persists on the margins, of course. But it’s far from mainstream.

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Economist & Soft-Pedaling Islam Blessed assurance. Bruce Bawer

By on August 5th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/economist-softpedaling-islam-bruce-bawer/

Yes, sprawling Muslim families on lifelong welfare are draining the treasuries of Western Europe. Muslim imams rule ever more imperiously over sharia enclaves in major cities from Manchester to Marseilles to Munich. Muslim youth gangs have turned ever-expanding sections of those cities into war zones and caused increasing numbers of Jews to flee the continent. And Muslim husbands who keep multiple wives at once and treat them like property – while forcing their daughters into arranged cousin marriages – have made a joke of Europe’s supposed devotion to human rights and sexual equality.

But never mind! Banish your worries! For years, that most smug, supercilious, and self-important of glossy newsweeklies, The Economist, has been taking a special interest in Islam, and especially on the phenomenon of Islam in the West. And for years it’s been assuring us that Islam shouldn’t trouble our little minds – that any problems incorrectly associated with it have nothing whatsoever to do with Islam itself; that most of those problems are, when you examine them dispassionately, our fault in one way or another; and that in the long run everything will be just fine.

Why does The Economist’s take on this topic matter? Because the mag, ubiquitous on international flights between leading business hubs, arguably exudes even more of an air of obnoxious authoritativeness – of absolutely definitive definitiveness – than the New York Times.

Its secret? While other long-lasting periodicals like Time fade in significance (and try to stay alive by running ever more inane, sensational nonsense), The Economist, based in the two top global cities, London and New York – and publishing its articles in a language that is its own unique, precious cross between British and American English – postures itself as having taken the high road.

Marketing itself to upscale readers as a calm, cool, preternaturally sober-minded compendium of objective reporting from every corner of the earth (and its lack of bylines makes every sentence sound like an ex cathedra expert statement), The Economist has garnered a reputation as an indispensable source of trustworthy information for serious cosmopolites who consider it their responsibility as citizens of the world to stay well-informed.

Consequently, The Economist’s perennially reassuring pontifications on Islam have had a meaningful – and deleterious – impact.

Its logic on the subject seems always to have been more or less as follows: economies are all-important; globalism is all-important; open borders are all-important; and sooner or later, inevitably, dollars to doughnuts, all those gazillions of Muslim immigrants in the West – or their children, or maybe their grandchildren – will go off the dole, pour into the workforce, and, at long last, provide Western European employers with a vast and wonderful supply of cheap labor. And what a beautiful day that will be for the global economy!

My awareness of The Economist’s line on these matters dates back to 2006, when I published While Europe Slept, my book warning about the threat of Islam in Europe. In their review, the mag’s anonymous scribes looked down upon it with a world-weary sigh.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Progressives’ Callous Indifference to the Loss of Small Businesses Targeting the mediating institutions that are independent of political power. Bruce Thornton

By on August 5th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/progressives-callous-indifference-loss-small-bruce-thornton/

Last year’s politicized and panicked lockdowns of the economy will be exacting costs for years. From deaths of despair like suicides and drug overdoses, to lost years of learning in schools and psychological fallout from children being isolated––we will be dealing with such consequences of policies that have nothing to do with science, and everything to do with political expediency. One other calamity is the fate of small businesses, met with callous indifference on the part of our cognitive elites who worked from home and never missed a paycheck.

Last year about 200,000 small businesses, with millions more still at risk, were another casualty of our feckless federal bureaucrats and state government tyrants. In addition to the lockdowns, these businesses also fell prey to months of nationwide riots, arson, looting, and vandalism that was tolerated and often abetted by state and federal authorities. Years of hard work were lost and dreams destroyed.

And now the hyped Delta variant hysteria is generating calls for more lockdowns and other impediments to small business success. This blow comes on top of the damage to the work force inflicted by giving the unemployed––who could have been hired by small enterprises trying to restore their businesses––perverse incentives to stay home, leaving many businesses chronically understaffed. Meanwhile, the people morally preening and shouting about “social justice” and “empathy” just callously pass on by.

One of this country’s most important avenues for fulfilling the American Dream has been blocked, and the virtues of self-reliance, self-control, frugality, hard work, and independence––the bedrock virtues that make us worthy of political freedom and that define the American character­­––are disappearing.

I learned the important role of small businesses from my own family. My grandfather came from Italy in 1906, an “illiterate peasant” according to the officials at Ellis Island. He made his way to the San Joaquin Valley to work in the fields. With hard work and persistence he managed to own his own country store and gas station, a feat impossible in the still-feudal conditions of rural Southern Italy. His four children were all successful, as were his grandchildren and now his great-grandchildren. One even managed to become a professor, something else unthinkable for an illiterate peasant’s grandchild in Southern Italy.

I also know what it’s like to own a small business from my father. He was a Dust-Bowl migrant from West Texas who dropped out of school and rode the rails to California. He trained as a barber, but his dream was to raise cattle. He did both, owning his own barber shops and raising cattle on 180 acres––not enough to support his family by running cattle, but enough to satisfy his boyhood dream and earn some extra money. By the time I was 11 or 12, my brother and I provided the labor, and my mom kept the books for both enterprises.

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Who Assassinated Haiti’s President? The Mystery Gets Murkier Nearly a month after President Jovenel Moïse was killed, the circumstances are just as hard to parse, with more new questions than answers

By on August 5th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/twists-and-turns-add-doubt-to-haitis-assassination-investigation-11628071201?mod=cxrecs_join#cxrecs_s

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti—After he climbed the bloodstained staircase, Carl Henry Destin found a baffling scene.

The Haitian president lay dead on the floor, with multiple gunshot wounds. Every drawer was flung open, and papers were scattered as if someone had been searching for something.

“The bedroom had been totally ransacked…documents everywhere,” Mr. Destin said. “There were a lot of witnesses, but they didn’t want to talk.”

Mr. Destin, a judicial officer often tasked with logging evidence at a murder scene, counted dozens of bullet holes and their locations at the presidential residence. He was struck by the chaos of the scene and the thin recollections from the bystanders who described little more than hearing the clatter of gunfire.

Outside, police frantically halted traffic as they searched for Colombian mercenaries they said had been running through the narrow streets of the hillside neighborhood.

Nearly a month after Haiti’s 53-year-old head of state, President Jovenel Moïse, was killed on July 7, the circumstances remain just as murky, with no shortage of suspects and speculation—and more new questions than answers. Complicating matters: key investigators, including Mr. Destin, are in hiding, saying they are being threatened and fear for their lives.

Haitian police have implicated more than 40 people in a plot to kill the president of one of the world’s poorest countries, in a conspiracy they say ran from working-class towns in the high Colombian Andes to the Miami suburbs.

But no clear motive or mastermind has emerged in the investigation.

In a jail near the country’s airport are 18 former soldiers from Colombia suspected in the plot; another three are dead after police said gunbattles broke out in the hills of the crowded capital of Port-au-Prince.

The men deny killing the president, and say they were on a lawful drug-enforcement mission and were set up to take the blame. One Colombian suspect in custody told a visiting human-rights lawyer that the president was already dead when he arrived on the scene.

Police have also detained a barely known Florida-based Haitian-born preacher who they say attempted to install himself as Haiti’s interim ruler. Haitian politicians say they have never heard of the man.

Several senior police officers, including Mr. Moïse’s own security chief and members of his detail, have been arrested. No one has yet explained how the attackers so easily entered the residence and carried out the crime.

The following account is based on more than a dozen interviews with legal officials, political advisers, diplomats, judicial officers and lawyers briefed on the investigation, and several currently under arrest, including Jean Laguel Civil, the head of presidential security.

The Wall Street Journal reviewed WhatsApp messages among some of the suspects and audio recorded during a private planning meeting involving the Colombian ex-soldiers. Documents recording testimony given by key witnesses and photos taken during and after the chaotic melée that led to the death of the president were also reviewed.

The information, which includes details that haven’t previously been reported, adds to questions about the official outlines of the investigation.

“I really don’t trust any immediate leads of what we’ve heard so far,” said Georges Fauriol, a Haiti expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank. “The story simply doesn’t add up.”

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

A Breakout Moment for a New Approach to Iran Neither arms control nor military force is realistic. What would a more practical policy look like?By Reuel Marc Gerecht and Ray Takeyh

By on August 5th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/iran-nuclear-deal-jcpoa-military-biden-ebrahim-raisi-11628101285?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Mohammad Khatami, an affable, intellectual cleric who believed in the Islamic revolution but wanted more humanity and democracy in government, unexpectedly won the Iranian presidential election on May 23, 1997. His victory marked the beginning of the Western left’s conviction that the clerical regime was evolving into a less religious and oppressive system.

But that isn’t panning out. Ebrahim Raisi, a cleric renowned for his ruthlessness, became president this week and is the apparent successor to Ali Khamenei as supreme leader. Joe Biden may be forced to answer a question presidents have preferred to avoid: Would Washington use force to stop the development of Iranian nuclear weapons? American presidents since 2002, when the Islamic Republic’s clandestine atomic program was revealed, have declared that Iran’s possessing such arms is unacceptable.

President Biden appears unprepared to unleash the U.S. Air Force, and the administration can’t plausibly argue that opening up more trade hurts the theocracy’s aggressive, Islamist ambitions. This leaves few options beyond economic penalties. The White House probably doesn’t appreciate the irony of its now reportedly contemplating leveling more sanctions on Tehran to coerce Mr. Khamenei to re-enter the nuclear deal, after Mr. Biden and his Iran team derided the sanctions diplomacy of Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign.

The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, with its sunset clauses and nonchalance about aggressive inspections, made sense as an arms-control agreement if the accord was merely one step in a process. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has, in his own way, stated exactly this, endorsing the need to make the agreement “longer, stronger, broader.” That wouldn’t be necessary if the JCPOA actually stopped, as former Secretary of State John Kerry put it, “all pathways” to the bomb and did something about the theocracy’s ballistic missiles and imperialism.

Continue reading →