RUTHFULLY YOURS

One year ago, Father Jacques Hamel was killed by two men, both of whom pledged allegiance to ISIS, while celebrating morning Mass in Normandy, France. Hamel had served as a priest for almost six decades. Pope Francis referred to him as a “martyr,” pointing out that he “accepted his martyrdom next to the martyrdom of Christ, on the altar.”

Martyrdom may seem like it is confined to the ancient past — something that Christians dealt with while under Roman dominion — but the last few years have witnessed an increasing number of Christian martyrs. Coptic Christians in Egypt, for example, have suffered numerous attacks by the Islamic State. Father Hamel joined the ranks of these martyrs, and did so with courage, in his final moments, to call the enemy by its real name, saying to the attackers, “Begone, Satan!”

Moreover, as John L. Allen Jr., the editor of Crux, observed, Hamel was “a classic exemplar of one of the most profound lessons of the martyrs”:

Beyond all the heartache and frustrations we may experience in the Church sometimes, there’s still something so precious about the faith that, when push comes to shove, ordinary people, with zero aspiration to heroism, will nevertheless pay in blood before they let it go.

While debates concerning the future direction of the Church have resulted in passionate disagreement between liberals and conservatives, Father Hamel is one subject on which Catholics of all political persuasions agree. “The extraordinary response to Hamel’s martyrdom throughout France,” writes Christopher White for Crux, “has been one of unity and an abiding belief that his sacrifice would yield a greater good for both the Church and the country.”

Besides nurturing a spirit of unity within the Church, Hamel’s death created an opportunity for a closer relationship between French Catholics and Muslims. At a Mass celebrated in honor of the one-year anniversary of his death, French president Emmanuel Macron noted that “By murdering Father Hamel at the foot of his altar, the two terrorists undoubtedly wanted to sow the thirst for vengeance and retaliation among French Catholics.” Instead, Catholic leaders refused to use tragedy to sow discord and fear, and in the days following Father Hamel’s death, Muslims across France attended Mass in solidarity with Catholics.

Father Hamel died just as inklings of a Catholic revival in France were becoming apparent. A few months ago, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, wrote in America magazine that he had begun to notice more people seemed to be attending Mass:

A few years ago, I started to realize something. Whenever I was less than five minutes early for Mass, I had to go to the overflow room, and I would typically have to step over people sitting on the floor to get there. The church was filled to the gills every Sunday, with young families and children most of the time. . . . Then I moved. And I saw the same thing. I live in a very different neighborhood now, one that is “upwardly mobile,” as real estate agencies coyly say. But on Sunday morning the church is packed.

SHARK ISLAND, Namibia—Just over a century ago, Germany built one of its first concentration camps on a narrow peninsula jutting into the Atlantic.

A 1904 uprising in what was then called German South-West Africa turned into a war of annihilation against the Herero and Nama peoples. At least 60,000 are believed to have died, including some 2,000 in the Shark Island camp, where inmates were starved, beaten and worked to death.

That episode of colonial brutality, considered by many historians to be the first genocide of the 20th century, is now testing the limits of historical apologies.

Namibia says it wants Germany to officially recognize that its actions constituted genocide, to issue a formal apology and to pay reparations. Berlin says it is willing to meet the first two demands and to pay some form of compensation. The two countries have been negotiating for more than a year.Other governments have expressed regret or sorrow for past atrocities. What makes the current situation novel is that most have stopped short of any official apology, and financial payments have been rare.

The talks “are being watched very closely by other countries,” says Germany’s ambassador to Namibia, Christian Schlaga.

Debate has surged in recent years about whether and how nations should take responsibility and make amends for horrors inflicted generations ago.

Belgium apologized for its role in the 1961 assassination of Congo’s first post-independence prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, but not for its colonial abuses in that country. In 2006, then-U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair expressed “deep sorrow” for Britain’s role in the slave trade, but didn’t apologize.

Former French President François Hollande recognized the suffering of Algerians under France’s “brutal and unfair” colonial rule, but again there was no official apology. Last year, U.S. President Barack Obama paid homage to the victims of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, but didn’t apologize.

Japan has come the closest to what Germany is trying to do now. In 2015, it settled a long-running dispute with South Korea by agreeing to pay about $9 million in support funds for surviving Korean “comfort women” used as sex slaves by the Japanese military in the 1930s and 1940s. Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe extended an apology.The question has exquisite historical resonance for Germany in particular. Countless museums and memorials throughout the country act as reminders of Germany’s genocidal slaughter during World War II. Because most Germans accept their history has dark chapters, and are proud of how they have been handled, they might find it easier to face colonial atrocities than citizens of other European powers, says Jürgen Zimmerer, professor of global history at the University of Hamburg and president of the International Network of Genocide Scholars.

Following World War II, Germany acknowledged its responsibility for the Holocaust and agreed to pay damages to survivors, but not to the families of those who were killed.

A successful conclusion to the negotiations between Germany and Namibia “would be a signal, and an invitation, to other former colonial powers to deal with their past,” says Medardus Brehl, a historian at the Institute for Diaspora and Genocide Studies at the ​Ruhr-University Bochum in Germany.

At the same time, ​a growing number of Germans are beginning to bristle at constantly carrying their historical guilt. Right-wing parties have recently called for the country to move beyond its past and develop a new sense of patriotism. CONTINUE AT SITE

BERLIN—A rejected asylum applicant from the United Arab Emirates killed one person and injured six others in a stabbing rampage at a Hamburg supermarket on Friday, officials said, an attack that could reignite debate over security and immigration as the German election approaches.

The 26-year-old suspect, whose identity wasn’t released, couldn’t be deported because he lacked identity papers, Hamburg Mayor Olaf Scholz said in a statement late Friday.

“It further makes me angry that the attacker appeared to be someone who sought protection among us in Germany and then turned his hatred against us,” Mr. Scholz said. “This shows how urgently the legal and practical obstacles to deportation must be removed.”

The attack began in a supermarket in the Barmbek section of northeast Hamburg, where the suspect stabbed a 50-year-old German man to death with a large knife, police said. The attacker injured five others, at least some of them as he fled, and a 35-year-old Turkish bystander suffered injuries as he subdued the attacker before authorities arrived.

The attacker yelled “Allahu akbar”—Arabic for “God is great”—according to one witness interviewed by Germany’s N-TV television and another whose interview with reporters on the scene circulated in a video on social media.

A Hamburg police spokeswoman said she couldn’t confirm the “Allahu akbar” exclamation or that the attack was ideologically motivated. “We are investigating in all directions,” she said.

But the revelation that a rejected asylum applicant appeared to have carried out the attack had the potential to revive Germany’s immigration debate—an issue that has largely faded into the background even as the Sept. 24 national election approaches. Ever since the influx of hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants to Germany two years ago, Chancellor Angela Merkel has pushed to tighten asylum laws, speed deportations and negotiated with Turkey and north African countries to reduce the number of migrants who reach Europe’s shores.

While several hundred asylum applicants are still crossing into Germany daily, officials say, those numbers are a far cry from the thousands a day seen in 2015. Germany hasn’t had a terrorist attack since last December, when an Islamic State supporter drove a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin, leaving 12 dead. CONTINUE AT SITE

The United States is facing a series of nuclear challenges, including maintaining our central strategic nuclear deterrent, stopping the use of small numbers of nuclear weapons against us by terrorists or rogue regimes, and ensuring that our allies and friends are also protected from nuclear attack.

While related, each of these pose unique challenges. While deterrence and homeland defense have been 100% perfect in stopping any use of nuclear weapons against the United States for over 70 years, and while the hope is that continued vigilance by our country will continue that record, there are no guarantees of future success.

But most importantly, we should take whatever action is needed to improve deterrence and defense, and we should definitely avoid making decisions that will undermine either. Key is to modernize our land based missile deterrent, a plan some small dozens of House and Senate members have recently declared probably unnecessary, including the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee.

The Russians and the Chinese are way ahead of us in deploying-building and putting the force in the field-new nuclear armed (1) land based missiles, (2) submarines and their associated missiles, and (3) bombers and cruise missiles. These dual country modernization programs were started over a decade ago and have accelerated even as American nuclear modernization efforts were delayed and underfunded.

Although the American nuclear posture review is not completed, it is fairly apparent the new administration will fund a robust nuclear modernization effort. The reason is simple: each of our three legs of our nuclear forces—land based missiles, submarines and bombers-are at or near their life expectancy and are in danger of rusting to obsolescence. And the cost of maintaining the current force beyond current plans is very high, and exceeds even the cost of new, replacement systems.

So obviously the smart plan is to modernize.

In addition, an effort to extend the life of some of these systems and forgo modernization is fraught with danger. For example, our 14 Trident submarines will have a hull life of 42 years, the longest ever in the history of the submarine US Navy, and assessments show they cannot be extended any further without a risk of a catastrophic collapse.

As for our land based missiles, the fuel and guidance systems can be maintained in the near term, but beyond 2030 would cost more than the new modernized ground based strategic deterrent (GBSD) missile replacement planned for the end of the next decade and be technologically untenable. None of this is conjecture-it is based on solid fact and analysis.

Particularly critical are the 450 land based Minuteman missiles scheduled for replacement and modernization with the GBSD. Contrary to sloppy thinking of nuclear modernization opponents, the land based missiles are highly survivable, have very high alert rates and thus cannot be easily targeted. They are also quick to their targets which denies an adversary the use of their own weapons, and are also highly affordable.

Let us examine each of these points in turn.

It is true that land based missiles are in fixed silos. But while their locations are known, they are spread out over three military bases in five states cumulatively the size of Texas, or nearly 700,000 square miles. This has led to some confused analysis. For example, one long-time opponent of land based missiles correctly explained at a recent conference that a country such as Russia would be crazy-“irrational to the extreme” to try and take out all 400 Minuteman missiles silos and their 48 associated launch control centers, as it would require the use of nearly 1000 warheads launched simultaneously. But then in the same breath, the critic justified his opposition to Minuteman by claiming the missiles were vulnerable to a surprise attack from the very same country-Russia-and thus must be deemed “vulnerable” and “destabilizing”. In that no rationale adversary would attack three American Minuteman bases, the missiles in their silos are perfectly safe.

Nazir Afzal, a former chief crown prosecutor and one of the most prominent Muslim lawyers in Britain, warned that an “industry” of Islamist groups in the country is undermining the fight against terrorism. He singled out the Islamist-dominated Muslim Council of Britain and also condemned “self-appointed” community leaders whose sole agenda was to present Muslims “as victims and not as those who are potentially becoming radicals.”

Col. Richard Kemp, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, charged London Mayor Sadiq Khan with “appeasing jihadists” for authorizing the Al-Quds Day march.

More than 40 foreign jihadists have used human rights laws to remain in Britain, according to an unpublished report delayed by the Home Office.

June 3. Khuram Shazad Butt, a 27-year-old Pakistani-born British citizen, Rachid Redouane, a 30-year-old who claimed to be Libyan and Moroccan and Youssef Zaghba, a 22-year-old Moroccan-Italian, murdered eight people and injured 50 others in a jihadist attack on and around the London Bridge. The three assailants were shot dead by police. It was the third jihadist attack in Britain in as many months.

June 3. Nazir Afzal, a former chief crown prosecutor and one of the most prominent Muslim lawyers in Britain, warned that an “industry” of Islamist groups in the country is undermining the fight against terrorism by peddling “myths” about the Prevent strategy, the government’s key anti-radicalization policy. He singled out the Islamist-dominated Muslim Council of Britain, and said he was shocked that in the agenda for its annual meeting there was “nothing about radicalisation and nothing about the threat of people going to Syria.” Afzal, who prosecuted the Rochdale sex-grooming gang, also condemned “self-appointed” community leaders whose sole agenda was to present Muslims “as victims and not as those who are potentially becoming radicals.”

June 3. Khalid Al-Mathkour, chairman of Kuwait’s sharia council, and Essam Al-Fulaij, a Kuwaiti government figure known for his anti-Semitic diatribes, are listed as trustees of a UK-registered charity that is building a mosque in Sheffield, according to the Telegraph. They have helped channel almost £500,000 ($650,000) into the project from Kuwait. Another £400,000 ($525,000) has been donated to the charity, the Emaan Trust, by a Qatari organization. The stated aim of the new mosque, which will have a capacity for 500 worshippers, is to “promote and teach Islamic morals and values to new Muslim generations.”

June 4. Prime Minister Theresa May said there was “far too much tolerance of extremism” in Britain and promised to step up the fight against Islamic terrorism after the London Bridge attack. “Enough is enough,” she said. May also claimed the jihadists held to an ideology that was a perversion of true Islam: “It is an ideology that claims our Western values of freedom, democracy and human rights are incompatible with the religion of Islam.”

June 5. Conservative election candidate Gordon Henderson said that Muslims are duty bound to report extremists in their midst:

“The only people who can defeat the Islamic terrorists are the British Muslims in whose midst they find sanctuary. It is time for peace-loving Muslims to start providing information to the police about those within their community that they suspect of plotting attacks. The only other option is to put all suspected terrorists in internment camps, and that is not a route I would like to go down. We tried it with the IRA and all it did was make the prisoners into martyrs.”

‘Justin Trudeau: Why Can’t He Be Our President?” asks the cover of the latest edition of Rolling Stone. Well, the Constitution. But let’s assume Canada’s prime minister was born an American citizen: On the strength of the slavering, feverish, we’re-in-heat-and-we-don’t-care-who-knows-it Rolling Stone profile, Trudeau couldn’t even get the nomination of the Democratic party.

Trudeau’s idyllic northern paradise is actually the world’s seventh-largest oil producer, and even Boy Band Angela Merkel doesn’t seem particularly eager to destroy the country’s fossil-fuel industry. Sensibly enough, he’s a big proponent of the Keystone Pipeline and Canada’s Kinder Morgan pipeline, which transports hydrocarbons between the oil sands of Alberta (which are “pockmarked,” RS gravely informs us, “like a B-52 bombing range”) and British Columbia. Sensibly enough, he notes that carbon-based fuel will be with us for quite some time: “One of the things that we have to realize is we cannot get off gas, we cannot get off oil, fossil fuels tomorrow — it’s going to take a few decades,” he tells RS. “Maybe we can shorten it, but there’s going to have to be a transition time.”

A few more decades of bowing and scraping to Big Carbon? Try selling that to American Democratic-party primary voters. Doesn’t Trudeau realize that climate change is an imminent existential threat, that fossil fuels are the ticking time bomb that will blow up the world? Trudeau lacks the necessary climate hysteria to be an American Democrat.

Yet Rolling Stone largely gives Trudeau a pass on his sheik-like affection for black gold and hurries on to other topics. Hey, Justin snowboards! He’s handsome! He loves diversity! RS is more interested in the fact that Trudeau’s defense minister is a member of a minority gruop: Harjit Sajjan was born in Punjab, India, wears a turban, and served in the Canadian military in Afghanistan. Women and minorities make up more than half his cabinet.

So here’s Rolling Stone’s politics: We’ll forgive you for turning Earth into a coal-black cinder as long as you keep cheering for identity politics in these final moments of suffering we share together. But if you really do want to live in a country led by Justin Trudeau, given that people not born American can’t actually be president of the United States, why not do what Rolling Stone writer Stephen Rodrick suggests in the kicker of his piece: “At this moment, Justin Trudeau’s Canada looks like a beautiful place to ride out an American storm.” Why won’t Justin’s American acolytes do what they keep promising to do and take off to the Great White North?

Editor’s note: The poor child featured in this story is referred to below by masculine pronouns – not because we have information as to his gender, but as a grammatical convention called the gender-neutral “he,” sometimes used outside insane liberal enclaves for gender-ambiguous singular nouns like “someone” and “everyone.”

The tired, inaccurate, and overused dismissal hurled at theists by the liberal elite is “there is no God because science.” The hilarious irony is the inconsistency they utilize in weighing their own beliefs and decisions against “science.” So long as they can use “science” to absolve themselves from accountability to absolutes (read: God), it is their friend, but shame on anyone who challenges any of their more radical beliefs on scientific grounds.

Those medical experts who claim that gender is binary? Well, they are nothing more than bigots trying to hinder human flourishing. Science is useful only when it serves the purpose of silencing those outdated enough to oppose “progress.”

Marching at the head of the Progress Parade is a Canadian creature who goes by the name of Kori Doty. And the creature has just given birth to the future – a child who, after a brief dispute, is the first to have a “U” on his birth certificate where others have been confined to the outdated norm of “F” and “M.” The “U,” of course, is for “unassigned” or “undetermined.”

At War with Gravity

In other words, when people asked Kori (who is a tertium quid, identifying as neither male nor female), “Do you know if you’re having a girl or a boy?” the response was, “I’m waiting until it is old enough to decide for itself.”

The real head-scratcher is why Kori would allow “themself” (the pronoun of choice for those at war with, among other things, the outdated norms of binary genders, hereafter avoided) to be so closed-minded and limited. Has she not thought through the ramifications of labeling her offspring a person? Why is she limiting the generation that will inherit the future to the category of human?

Why not label her child a creature? Or better yet, a “being”? What if he grows up and decides he wants to identify as a yeti or a demogorgon, or some other fictitious creature? Who is Kori to tell her child that he must be human? Why stop there? So long as we’re freeing ourselves from the limitations of reality, what if the child decides he wants to be an inanimate object, like a slab of stone or the lost Ark of the Covenant?

I know, I know: this is too radical. The world is not ready for this type of progress quite yet. By proposing these outlandish ideas, I’m likely to get stoned. Let’s start off small and try to wrap our heads around Doty’s small step toward “progress.” Her aim: to remove gender from birth certificates, or at the very least give a third option.

As for me, it might be a while before I can legally identify as rubber. But as soon as I can, watch out, world, ’cause every stone you throw at me will bounce right back at you!

The Fight for Freedom to Be “Other”

Call me old-fashioned, but I tend to think this sort of silliness is better left to the world of science fiction. The true victim here is Kori’s poor child, who gets the pleasure of being the subject of a ridiculous social experiment.

Doty is seeking to make history by fighting for the right to free our children from the outdated norms of being labeled male or female at birth. It is a difficult and unnecessary process, Doty argues, to attempt to change one’s gender at a later time in life. Then again, the denial of reality is always a difficult process. The man who identifies as a butterfly finds that out every time he jumps from the roof of his garage only to land on the cold, hard, familiar blacktop once again. Reality is so unforgiving to those who wish to live a fairy tale.

Kori is trying to remove any reference to gender from her own birth certificate as well. Should Kori fail, she’ll sleep better at night knowing that if not for her, at least her child and the next generation will be freed from the constraints of having to identify as a male or female (so long as he can avoid the pesky reminder between his legs).

Doty reminds us that it is discriminatory to assume that because someone has a penis or a vagina, that person is either a male or a female. Gender is a figment of the imagination to those who live in reality, and they must not assault those who live in alternate realities with their bigotries.

Lulled by the charms of rational nationalism, which include the growth and global spread of prosperity, the progressive mind fails to spot its twin in the shadows, irrational nationalism. The besetting sin is ignorance of the dark side, a weakness that catches liberals asleep at the wheel every time.

Battle over the idea of progress has been long-running, depending on how you want to see it, since the Enlightenment, or in recent forms since 1923, when J.B. Bury’s The Idea of Progress appeared. This seminal book summed up progress as an optimistic function of secularism, rationalism and science. It became a new religion on the Continent during the eighteenth century and—delayed by Napoleon’s wars—in England during the nineteenth century. Fortune, however, proved fickle. World wars and depression in the first half of the twentieth century destroyed the belief, replacing it with the tragic sense of life. Angst eased during the “trente glorieuses” only to mount again as those years ended ingloriously amid stagflation, unemployment, unsavoury dictators and underground torture.

The twentieth century, however, was a game of two halves. Rising liberal capitalist prosperity transformed decisively, if unevenly, home, hearth and workshop around the globe, not to mention its face, seen today by billions in comfort from forty thousand feet up. Most non-capitalist countries rushed to join in the game, as Marx predicted. The very prosperous again saw need to rebel against their oppression by the poor, a development foreseen by Aristotle long before Thomas Piketty.1 So are further optimistic cannonades in the progress wars now due? Some recent writers think so, among them Joel Mokyr, an economics and technology historian, in A Culture of Growth, and Matt Ridley, an evolutionist, in The Evolution of Everything. On the side of sceptics, and perhaps populist politicians, John Gray’s Soul of the Marionette weighs in with counter-punches.2 Who is right, or at least headed in the right direction?

Mokyr’s Culture of Growth makes a pleasant change from the tsunami of books on globalisation, for or against. He steps back in time, albeit with modernity in view, and undertakes to explain “why” and “how” what happened in Europe from 1500 to 1700 led to growth through scientific and technological progress, perhaps deeper background to David Landes’s work on the period after 1750, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. 3 Mokyr’s central idea is that writers and thinkers in Europe developed a preference for what Bacon called “useful knowledge”, rebelling against subservience to traditions of authority that Mokyr thinks characterised Europe till that point, much as it did other world cultures. To explain the unique European break-out, Mokyr tries to apply systems drawn from evolutionary and economic studies to the development of ideas by thinkers, both well-known and less well-known. Along the way he gives good accounts of influences prevailing among them. And in a separate article dealing with his leading exemplar, Descartes, he concludes, like Churchill, or perhaps Maurice Chevalier, that belief in progress is “better than the alternative”.4

But how much of this is true? Amiel maintained that “a belief is not true because it is useful”. And Bacon, a courtier high up the slippery pole of authority, thought he saw that “a man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true”. What does belief mean? What are the alternatives? Faith? Hope? Charity? Fate? The Deity? Which is better? And how can describing the factual “evolution” of any of these give rise to any judgment of value?

Few nowadays will refuse importance to the idea that knowledge should be useful to human life in the here and now rather than in the life to come, if any. This was a leading idea of the Renaissance and Reformation in major European countries in general, together with secular ideas about linear time—as opposed to classical circularity—and the value of the individual (both concepts invented by the Church and adopted by secular thinkers).5 These ideas have long been noted—although Mokyr does not note them—as crucial to the rise of new liberal ideas in social, economic and political thought as well as in arts, medicine, science and technology. Altered worldviews resulted, about history, geography and “Nature” as well as about humanity’s place in the scheme of things. Bacon’s own career illustrates this. Slipping back down the pole—he accepted so many bribes he threatened the official system of bribery—he turned to writing essays, essentially tips for apprentice courtiers, and scientific utopias. Nevertheless, the idea of revolt against authority may seem newer than it actually is. Bury mentioned it in his book, but it had short shelf life and has been soft-pedalled in subsequent skirmishes for good reason. It is wrong.

Before what today are called secular issues moved outside the Church, they were fully and usually violently discussed inside it, as the reign of Frederick II showed in Italy or Henry VIII in England. Paradoxically, the first lay people were French Protestants. Twelfth-century Albigensians and Waldensians, repressed as heretics and denied sacraments by the authorities, were forced into secular occupations as merchants, bankers, medical men and weavers. These were travelling jobs so their ideas survived and spread in extensive, if repressed networks. (Medicine and weaving were the locus of innovation, if not revolution, in scientific, technological and political affairs, much as merchants and bankers were in commerce, and possibly still are.) As happens under all repressions, the ideas eventually resurfaced with renewed energy and fanaticism, in this case, in Huguenot and Calvinist forms. When persecutions (briefly) eased during the Huguenot wars, the first secular discussions were held between Catholics and Huguenots—in the salon of one Madame Des Loges. An achievement of Renaissance and Reformation—although it may be too soon to know if it is an achievement—was to extend to anyone the critical spirit that spiritual and secular rulers never denied themselves nor allowed to others.

One almost has to admire Iran’s chutzpah. On Wednesday after the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill, 419-3, which would impose sanctions on Iran’s ballistic-missile program, its foreign ministry called the legislation “illegal and insulting.” On Thursday Iran made a scheduled launch of a huge missile, which it says will put 550-pound satellites into orbit.

The only people who should feel surprised or insulted by this are Barack Obama and John Kerry, who midwifed the 2015 nuclear-weapons agreement with the untrustworthy Iranians. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert rightly called the missile launch a violation of the spirit of that agreement.

That is as far as she can take it because Iran’s ballistic-missile program wasn’t formally in the nuclear agreement, despite Mr. Kerry’s statements of concern during negotiations. In the end he wanted a deal more than limits on those missiles. We assume Iran’s missile engineers are at least as competent as those in North Korea, which is approaching the ability to deploy intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Advocates of the nuclear deal persist in arguing that Iran is in compliance with its provisions. It takes considerable credulousness to believe that over the course of this agreement the Iranian military won’t adapt technical knowledge gained about launch and guidance from projects like its “satellite missile” program. With or without compliance, Iran is making progress as a strategic threat.

Iran successfully test-launched a rocket designed to carry satellites into space on Thursday, official media reported, a move that could further inflame tensions with the U.S. as Congress passes new sanctions on the country.

The test-launch of the rocket, called the Simorgh, or “Phoenix” in Persian, took place at the official opening of a space center around 140 miles east of Tehran, according to the official Islamic Republic News Agency. The Simorgh can carry satellites weighing up to 250 kilograms into low-earth orbit, it said.

In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said the U.S. considers the launch to be in violation of the spirit of a landmark 2015 nuclear agreement between world powers and Iran.

She also said it violates a United Nations Security Council resolution endorsing the deal, a complaint the U.S. has lodged with respect to other Iranian missile tests. The U.N. resolution in question doesn’t specifically bar missile testing but calls on Iran not to undertake such activities.

U.S. military officials said Thursday that there was no indication that any satellite had been successfully deployed or that the rocket had reached space.

Capt. Brian Maguire, a spokesman for US Strategic Command, said the military tracks more than 24,000 objects in space that are bigger than a softball and that there was “nothing new to add” to the list on Thursday.

While Iran’s satellite launches aren’t part of its ballistic missile program, some of the country’s critics in the West see satellite-carrying rockets as abetting missile development and contrary to the spirit of international agreements. Many of the technologies used in satellite launches have applications in long-range missiles.

The U.S. sees the move as a “provocative action” and as “continued missile development,” Ms. Nauert said.

In an interview earlier this week with The Wall Street Journal, President Donald Trump said he doesn’t expect to find Iran to be in compliance with the nuclear deal when a periodic administration review is due in October, and said he would overrule his aides, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, to declare Iran noncompliant. CONTINUE AT SITE