Displaying the most recent of 89718 posts written by

Ruth King

Bassem Youssef and the Self-Imposed Limitations of the Nice Muslim Review of “Tickling Giants” and “Revolution for Dummies.” Danusha V. Goska

Tickling Giants is a 111-minute, 2017 documentary that tells the story of “Egypt’s Jon Stewart.” Tickling Giants is produced, written and directed by Sara Taksler. She’s a relative unknown who does a technically excellent job, earning her 100% fresh rating at RottenTomatoes.

Bassem Youssef is a cardiothoracic surgeon with movie-star looks and charisma. In 2011, when he was 37, he began broadcasting satirical commentary on the Arab Spring. He produced videos in the laundry room of his apartment and posted them on YouTube. He hoped for a few thousand hits. He reached millions of viewers.

Youssef graduated to TV. An estimated forty million viewers watched his show – the largest ratings in Egyptian TV history. Jon Stewart had around two million viewers per show. Tickling Giants’ account of Youssef’s career is captivating and inspirational, occasionally funny and often quite sad. It was shot mostly in Cairo. Unless I blinked and missed it, you never see a pyramid, but, rather, street scenes, traffic, the Nile, and protests in Tahrir Square. Tickling Giants depicts appreciative Egyptian audiences gathering in outdoor cafes to laugh at Youssef’s show on big-screen TVs.

Youssef satirized Islamists, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hosni Mubarak, Mohamed Morsi, the Egyptian army and Egypt’s current president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Youssef faced tighter and tighter restrictions on what he could say. He and his staff faced greater and greater personal threats. Thugs, possibly paid by the government, chanted “Death to Youssef” outside his studio. An imam discussed whether it would be permissible to kill Youssef. The imam counseled, “Not yet.” Youssef’s collaborator, Tarek, had to abandon Egypt. Tarek’s father and brother were arrested and held for months without any reason. Youssef himself eventually was forced out of Egypt. Tickling Giants ends with Youssef in exile, giving talks in support of free speech at prestigious awards ceremonies in Western nations. He now lives in the US with his wife and children.

Youssef’s show had a large staff of creative, young, dynamos. The scenes of these idealists gazing out the window of their offices at the thugs calling for their deaths, and the arrival of armed troops to form a cordon in front of their studio, reminded me of life in Poland in 1989. The year that Soviet-imposed Polish communism breathed its last, I participated in demonstrations organized by the Orange Alternative, a group that undermined the authorities through humor. We held a rally celebrating the Red Army. Young Polish rebels gave elaborate, satirical speeches expressing “gratitude” for being “liberated” by the Russians.

As fine as Tickling Giants is, and as much as I could identify with its revolutionary spirit, I kept seeing the empty spaces where the censor’s X-Acto knife had sliced out key elements of the Arab Spring story.

In 2011, the year Youssef’s show launched, journalist Lara Logan was beaten and sexually assaulted by hundreds of men in Tahrir Square. They called her a Jew. She is not Jewish. The assailants used their cellphones to record their assault.

That same year, the otherwise anonymous “Girl in the Blue Bra” was dragged across pavement, beaten with batons, and kicked by Egyptian military. After they stripped off her abaya, one soldier stepped directly on her breasts, clothed only in a blue bra. Her abused image traveled round the world. Hillary Clinton decried “the systematic degradation of Egyptian women.”

Tahrir Square is inextricably linked with taharrush. Men encircle women, sexually assault them, and video-record the assaults. Al Akhbar describes taharrush as a “prominent feature” of life in Egypt, and reports that Egyptian women as well as men tend to blame the victim. President Sisi visited a taharrush victim in the hospital. The Guardian, a liberal newspaper, ran an article entitled, “80 Sexual Assaults in One Day – The Other Story Of Tahrir Square.” During New Year’s celebrations in 2015-16, Muslim men committed mass sexual assaults in Europe. Maajid Nawaz and others pointed to Tahrir Square as the possible petri dish of this contagion.

In Tickling Giants, the protestors are all right-thinking idealists, engaged in a communal effort as wholesome as an Amish barn-raising. Women are prominent as onscreen spokespersons.

Trump Demands Prison for Huma Abedin Like her boss, the top Hillary Clinton aide broke espionage laws. Matthew Vadum

President Trump is demanding former top Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin be imprisoned for violating national security protocols and that an investigation be opened into former FBI Director James Comey.

At 7:48 a.m. Tuesday President Trump tweeted:

Crooked Hillary Clinton’s top aid[e], Huma Abedin, has been accused of disregarding basic security protocols. She put Classified Passwords into the hands of foreign agents. Remember sailor[’]s pictures on submarine? Jail! Deep State Justice Dep[ar]t[ment] must finally act? Also on Comey & others[.]

With the connivance of the Obama administration, Abedin and Clinton also purloined call logs, scheduling documents, and files described as “Muslim Engagement” from the Department of State when they left their jobs there. They labeled the government-owned documents “private.” Clinton also took with her a physical file of what has been described as “the log of the Secretary’s gifts with pictures of gifts,” which may contain proof of bribes provided to Clinton.

Although it is unusual for a president to seek prosecution of his defeated enemies, the Clinton crime family is so corrupt and so sinister that failing to act against these reprobates is to commit a grave injustice. The brazen criminality of Hillary Clinton and those around her in the previous election cycle is utterly unprecedented in modern American politics, far surpassing the relatively minor-league shenanigans of President Richard Nixon in seriousness. To ignore Clinton’s unlawful activities would be to discard the rule of law and affirm that powerful elites are not held to the same standards as ordinary Americans.

Clinton’s campaign aggressively sought out new frontiers in unethical conduct, funding the Russian dossier compiled by Fusion GPS, a tainted political opposition research paper that Comey’s FBI apparently relied on during its investigation. In the discredited dossier based in part on Kremlin-provided information, it was claimed Trump hired Russian prostitutes to urinate on a hotel bed.

The dossier was just one of many outrageous dirty tricks by Clinton’s campaign. Clinton used the Democratic National Committee to snuff out Bernie Sanders’ bid for her party’s nomination, and personally authorized the illicit efforts of socialist felon Bob Creamer and organizer Scott Foval who fomented violence at Trump campaign rallies, as James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas group revealed in undercover videos.

Trump’s comments came after the Department of State released classified emails located on the laptop computer of Abedin’s now-imprisoned sex offender husband, former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.). The document dump came last week in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by good government group Judicial Watch.

The FBI’s announcement that it was probing the emails gave Trump an extra line of attack against Clinton in the final days of the 2016 election campaign. For her part, Clinton herself can’t stop whining about what the FBI did and blaming the agency that exposed her wrongdoings for her humiliating electoral defeat.

Tony Thomas The Original Power Couple Part one

Nicolae Ceaucescu and wife Elena were dispatched with extreme prejudice when the Romania people finally rid themselves of a duo so brazen in their greed and tyranny no writer of fiction would have dared invent them. It’s quite a story, not least the gullibility of leaders in the West.

Britain’s Islam-friendly politicians, led by London’s Muslim Mayor Sadiq Khan, are campaigning to cancel Prime Minister Theresa May’s invitation to President Trump for a State visit in 2018. Britain has not always been so fussy about who gets a State reception. In the wake of a trip to Bucharest I’ve been researching the Communist-era dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaucescu and his wife, Elena (left).

They were invited to Britain by Labor Prime Minister James Callaghan in 1978. Callaghan pimped a reluctant Queen Elizabeth to meet them at Victoria Station, and put them up in Buckingham Palace. Ceaucescu even got a ride with Her Majesty in the State landau. They were accompanied by bodyguard General Ion Pacepa, who defected to the West a month later, and a clatter of Household Regiment cavalry. The Queen later described the visit as “the worst three days of my life”. She was required, among other indignities, to award him the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, subsequently revoked in 1989.

Ceaucescu came ostensibly “to make firm friends among Western nations”, as the newsreels put it, and to sign a £200-million deal to buy several British Aerospace BAC 1-11 airliners (predecessor to DC9s and B737s) and build scores more in Romania under licence for export to China and the Third World. His actual goal was to open British doors for Romanian secret service men, doubling as technicians, to steal airline, Rolls Royce engine and Harrier jump-jet technology, to be on-sold to Moscow notwithstanding Ceaucescu’s vaunted hostility to Brezhnev.

The airliner deal turned into farce. An entire assembly line was air-freighted to Romania to make six BAC 1-11s a year. At its peak the Romanians had 4400 skilled workers on the job. But the plane was already obsolete and actual production was no more than one a year. The two nearly finished planes were left to rot and rust after Ceaucescu’s overthrow. He also defaulted on the hard currency required and sought to pay in barter. The first shipload of Romanian strawberries was rotten by the time it reached the wharf.

In Bucharest I joined a tour of the Ceaucescus’ Primaverii or “Spring” residential palace, all of us especially slack-jawed at the indoor tropical garden built on top of a swimming pool, with infra-red heating equivalent to power 100 normal apartments. The pool’s rear walls comprise a million-piece mosaic of pretty fishes that took artists two years to complete. This was just one of his five official residences, 39 guest houses, 21 exclusive apartments in embassies, nine planes, three helicopters and three presidential trains. Plus the couple had a hospital reserved for themselves alone.

Tony Thomas The Original Power Couple – Part Two

George Orwell was prescient about 1984. The Romanian regime of Nicolae Ceaucescu and wife Elena produced TV sets with two-way transmitters – you watched the TV and it ‘watched’ you, although even they must have know it was overkill, given the legions of flesh-and-blood informers.

Under the Ceaucsecu dictatorship, Romanians’ in the 1970s-80s were forced into abject poverty – only Albania may have been poorer in the Eastern bloc. People’s desperation for food and warmth was coupled with passivity enforced by the dreaded, mysterious Securitate, or secret police. In this essay, a follow-up to one earlier on the Ceaucescu couple’s personal lifestyle, I’ll describe living conditions and then the Securitate operations. These climaxed in the violent Christmas 1989 revolution, apparently faked-up by the Securitate as cover for installing their own people at the top. To this day, no-one knows what really went on.

The Liberty Center Mall in Bucharest looks like a classy Western shopping mall, with fashion brands, food, a 3D cinema and an ice skating rink. Who would guess it took over the site of one of Ceaucescu’s feeding stations for the city’s populace, dubbed “Hunger Circuses”.

The circus element was a dome on each of the five identical feeding complexes, similar to the city’s actual circus building. The dictator finished two, and three more were under way at the time of the Christmas 1989 revolution or coup, which left him riddled with AK47 bullets. Incredibly, his plan involved preventing Bucharest’s population from kitchen-cooking and family meals, in favor of regimented feeding by the state in giant soup kitchens, officially called “Agro-Alimentary Complexes”.

On Mondays, for example, everyone’s main meal would be, say, goulash; on Tuesday, cabbage rolls; and Wednesday, bean soup. Food shopping other than at the ‘circuses’ would be extinguished. New apartments wouldn’t need kitchens.

It’s unclear whether any Hunger Circus actually got to operate, or how state-sponsored meals could work during food austerity. As one interviewee recorded, perhaps in hypothetical terms, “You go there, you take your three little boxes, you go home, you heat them and eat them. The bad thing is that behind this project there was a terrible idea. Since everything can be found like this, there is no more need for markets for raw products.”

Ceaucescu viewed his subjects like a chicken farmer calculating inputs and outputs. People needed only 3000 calories a day, times the population of 22m. He could reserve the equivalent total of grains, rice, meat, and eggs for the population, leaving the rest for export to earn hard currency to pay off foreign debt. Romania had in 1981 defaulted on these US$11 billion debts after the Iranian oil shock of 1979 and Ceaucescu was determined to never again be dictated to by the IMF. He paid off the last foreign debts a couple of months before he was overthrown. He still spent on the military and his wasteful megaprojects such as the world’s biggest administration building, today 90% mothballed.

Time is Not on the Mullahs’ Side By Brandon J. Weichert

Iran has been racked for almost a week by nationwide protests and rioting over the rule of the mullahs—unrest that shows no sign of abating any time soon. What began as a protest against rising prices and an otherwise torpid economy has quickly turned into a full-blown national movement challenging the very legitimacy of the Islamic Republic itself.

We’ve been down this path before, of course. The short-lived “Green Revolution” of 2009 was the last time a popular uprising threatened the hardline theocratic government. Given the opportunity to back the protesters, President Obama chose to lead from behind and do nothing. Although President Trump has tweeted his support for the demonstrators this time, it remains to be seen what exactly the United States can do and how effective these protests will be in forcing political reform.

One thing is certain: the Islamic Republic’s days are numbered. This is a protest of the young from across the country versus the old elite in Tehran. Whether change happens now or in another decade, the rising generation of Persians largely reject the fundamentalist Shia Islam that has governed their country since the late 1970s.

Today, Iran’s city-dwelling youth are largely Westernized and well-educated. While many may still pray toward Mecca and believe in the Koranic teachings of their elders, they have created a natural separation between the secular world and the religious one (not unlike the sort of separation that exists in most liberal Western democracies today).

It’s true, as Michael Ledeen pointed out, that rural Iran remains more religious and traditional than their urban countrymen. But most of the unrest, in fact, has been in the poorer, rural, and more religious parts of the country. Rioters even burned a seminary in Qom, which is the center of Shia Islam. As one observer noted, “That’s comparable to anti-Catholic riots in Vatican City.”

But it isn’t just a cultural shift that signals the regime’s eventual demise. Fact is, Iran has a fertility crisis. At 1.68 children per 1,000 women (as of 2015), Iran is in the doldrums of an ongoing baby bust. David P. Goldman has argued that Iran’s demographic decline will lead to severe political instability. Iran’s “baby bust” coincides roughly with the life of the current regime—and it shows no sign of abating. In the face of declining economic opportunity and political repression, instability is likely to increase. Once it reaches a critical mass, Iran’s totalitarian theocracy will change.

Abandoning the NeverTrump Ship By Mike Sabo

With 2017 safely behind us and a new year beginning, the NeverTrump faction continues to offer opinions on President Trump that range from thoughtful and surprisingly honest to ill-considered and seething with resentment.

Among the more thoughtful examples was an end-of-the-year column by Tim Carney, the more-or-less NeverTrump commentary editor at The Washington Examiner. Every year, Carney owns up to his biggest political miscalculation over the previous 365 days.

For 2017, his most glaring mistake was predicting Trump “wouldn’t appoint a restrained, conservative judge to the Supreme Court.” Contrary to Carney’s grave doubts, Trump “gave us a superbly qualified, brilliant, conservative justice in Neil Gorsuch.” Although it’s early yet, Gorsuch already looks like a very able successor to former Justice Antonin Scalia, a man he greatly admired for his judicial mind, character, and integrity.

Carney harbors major reservations on what he considers the president’s many character flaws (he argues these helped lose “winnable” races in Virginia and Alabama and risks the GOP alienating young voters). Nevertheless, he thinks it’s “possible that Trump will prove himself obviously better than Clinton. And that’s not what I expected.”

What about Evan McMullin, the candidate Carney voted for in 2016? He writes:

These days, I find myself regularly wishing I could make McMullin go away. Like almost every McMullin voter I know, I’m embarrassed by his post-election behavior. Most conservatives who voted for McMullin maintain a critical and skeptical stance towards Trump. McMullin, though, has joined the performative #Resistance, blasting as counterrevolutionaries anyone who doesn’t go far enough in castigating every action of the president, even the harmless and salutary ones.

Ouch.

This tracks with the results of an unscientific Twitter poll Sean Davis of The Federalist recently conducted, in which 90 percent of more than 2,300 participants said they regret voting for McMullin.

NeverTrump Pretzel Logic
Other commentators weren’t as thoughtful as Carney. Jonah Goldberg twisted himself into a logical pretzel in his final National Review column of 2017.

Trying to get around the problem that has plagued the likes of Jennifer Rubin and David Frum—rejecting policy positions they formerly held simply because Trump holds them—Goldberg adopts another noxious form of post hoc rationalization.

He admits Trump has had a bevy of policy successes—from “a record number of judicial appointments, including a Supreme Court justice” to “the defeat of [the] Islamic State”—but argues the president had little or nothing to do with these victories.

“Tax reform was carried across the finish line by the GOP congressional leadership,” he writes. “Net neutrality was repealed by independent Republicans at the Federal Communications Commission.”

While technically correct, Goldberg’s statements are literal to the point of absurdity. It’s akin to saying since Ulysses S. Grant didn’t personally fight in every battle as commander of the Union armies in the waning days of the Civil War, he didn’t deserve credit for those final victories. The only reason for tax reform and Net Neutrality repeal—to say nothing of a host of other regulatory reforms—is that Trump rather than Hillary Clinton won the election.

The Bloodless War against American Exceptionalism By Susan Stanton

Unprecedented social and political conflict was laid bare in 2017, the likes of which have seldom been seen before. Our American social fabric is in tatters. We are looking less enlightened and more divided than at any time since the Civil War. Progressives on both seaboards are in a battle for political supremacy over old-school thinkers. Boundaries are analogous to a resurrection of the Mason-Dixon line, except it’s now the East and West Coasts versus the rest of America. Comparing more recent history, we look even less unified than we did in the 1960s – which says something painful about our current political climate. What’s it all about?

It’s about cognitive dissonance and the hatred of one prominent man: our courageous president, Donald Trump. Because of a startling election victory and the president’s penchant for keeping promises, hideous lies, innuendo, and insults fly from liberal and conservative mouths alike. Mainly powered by vitriolic progressive henchmen, this election was largely misunderstood by the over-privileged and their cronies. Zero tolerance for opposing opinions has been widespread. Meanwhile, the world laughs at the comedic chasing down of an imaginary Russian menace.

As parents, we have sacrificed to put our young people through college and graduate school only to have them emerge with damaged attitudes and socialist beliefs. Some poorly advised students unwisely shouldered huge college loans. When they failed to make good on their promissory notes in a fashion commensurate with their earning power, they believed that society should rescue them from their irresponsible choices. Bernie lost the primary, their socialist ideals crumbled, and they turned to his opponent for consolation.

In the previous century, American citizens would have graciously accepted the election results and moved on with their lives. Instead of raucous protest, they went back to raising their children and quietly making positive changes within their communities. Generally, only a few kooks dove off the deep end to lead marches against the establishment. In bygone days, none acted out like the maniacal banshees currently screaming at the heavens over their lost election. This achieves nothing, but it demonstrates how foolishly self-involved they are in their attempts to derail this president.

The ‘Time’s Up’ Campaign Is Mostly Repackaged Feminist Garbage By D. C. McAllister

A new spin-off from the #MeToo Movement, which brought awareness to sexual harassment allegations in the workplace, reveals once again how feminism today isn’t pro-woman or pro-justice; it’s anti-man at the core and seeks power, not equality under the law.

The “Time’s Up” campaign was created by Hollywood actresses who want to expand their fight against “systemic sexual harassment” in the entertainment industry to “blue-collar workplaces nationwide.”

Thousands of actresses and industry insiders have been meeting since the fall to promote solidarity among women and bring about change in the workforce through the following initiatives, as reported in The New York Times:

— A legal defense fund, backed by $13 million in donations, to help less privileged women — like janitors, nurses and workers at farms, factories, restaurants and hotels — protect themselves from sexual misconduct and the fallout from reporting it.

— Legislation to penalize companies that tolerate persistent harassment, and to discourage the use of nondisclosure agreements to silence victims.

— A drive to reach gender parity at studios and talent agencies that has already begun making headway.

— And a request that women walking the red carpet at the Golden Globes speak out and raise awareness by wearing black.

“Now, unlike ever before, our access to the media and to important decision makers has the potential of leading to real accountability and consequences,” the Time’s Up campaign states. “We want all survivors of sexual harassment, everywhere, to be heard, to be believed, and to know that accountability is possible.”

To every woman employed in agriculture who has had to fend off unwanted sexual advances from her boss, every housekeeper who has tried to escape an assaultive guest, every janitor trapped nightly in a building with a predatory supervisor, every waitress grabbed by a customer and expected to take it with a smile, every garment and factory worker forced to trade sexual acts for more shifts, every domestic worker or home health aide forcibly touched by a client, every immigrant woman silenced by the threat of her undocumented status being reported in retaliation for speaking up and to women in every industry who are subjected to indignities and offensive behavior that they are expected to tolerate in order to make a living: We stand with you. We support you.

Study: 27% of California Adolescents Identify as ‘Nongender Conforming’ By Tom Knighton

Acceptance has morphed into transphilia: the culture is pushing it as cool or trendy.
A recent study of adolescents in the state of California by researchers at UCLA found that an eyebrow-raising percentage now identify as “nongender conforming.”

“We found that 27 percent of youths age 12 to 17 in California, or about 796,000, are GNC,” the study stated.

The study grouped the kids into three definitions: “gender conforming,” “androgynous,” or “highly nongender conforming.” They found that 20.8 percent were categorized as “androgynous,” and an additional 6.2 percent as “highly nongender conforming.”

This is a huge number that does not align with any prior studies, such as the 4.1 percent of the population of the country that Gallup found identify as LGBT — and only a fraction of that 4.1 percent were “T.”

How could the UCLA researchers possibly come up with such a result? Could one state have such a disproportionate percentage of the nongender conforming population? Further, could a massive percentage of that population happen to be kids aged 12-17?

Sorry, I’m not buying that. So what gives? CONTINUE AT SITE

America’s Alarmingly Archaic Arsenal The U.S. nuclear deterrent has kept the peace for years. If it withers, it will keep the peace no longer.By Mark Helprin

The Trump administration’s recently unveiled National Security Strategy is an excellent and overdue statement of intent. But unless it is ruthlessly prioritized, political and budgetary realities will make it little more than a wish list. And in regard to nuclear weapons, it hardly departs from the insufficient Obama -era policy of replacing old equipment rather than modifying each element of the nuclear triad to meet new challenges.

National survival depends on many factors: the economy, civil peace, constitutional fidelity, education, research, and military strength across the board. Each has a different timeline and resiliency. Nuclear forces, on the other hand, may have a catastrophically short timeline combined with by far the greatest immediate effect.

Alone of all crucial elements, the failure of America’s nuclear deterrent is capable of bringing instant destruction or unavoidable subjugation, as the deterrent’s unarrested decline will lead to either the opportunity for an enemy first strike or the surrender of the U.S. on every foreign front and eventually at home.

Believers in total nuclear abolition fail to recognize that if they are successful, covert possession of just a score of warheads could mean world mastery. And though they, like everyone else, are routinely deterred (from telling off the boss or driving against the flow of traffic), they fail to extend their understanding to nuclear deterrence. They seem as well not to grasp that whereas numerical reduction from tens of thousands of warheads would reduce the chances of accident, below a certain point it would tempt an aggressor by elevating the potential of a successful first strike. Nor do they allow that Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran—which have through their conduct of war and in suppressing their populations callously sacrificed more than 100 million of their own people—subscribe to permissive nuclear doctrines and thresholds radically different from our own.

The Obama administration understood nuclear rejuvenation to mean merely updating old systems rather than changing the architecture of the deterrent to match Russia’s and China’s programs, as well as advances in technology. Given that short of abject surrender the sole means of preventing nuclear war is maintaining the potential to inflict unacceptable damage upon an enemy and/or shield one’s country from such damage, what are our resources, and against what are they arrayed?

The “nuclear triad” commonly referred to is rather a pentad, its land, air, and sea legs joined by missile defense and the survivability of national infrastructure. America’s land leg comprises static, silo-based missiles, which (other than in the potentially catastrophic launch-on-warning posture) are vulnerable not only to nuclear strike, but, with soon-to-come millimeter accuracy, even to conventional warheads. Russia, China, and North Korea have road-mobile missiles (and Russia, additional rail-based ones), making their land legs more survivable and in the case of tunnel systems—of which we have none and China has 3,000 miles—unaddressable and uncountable.

The U.S. air leg consists of ancient bombers and outdated standoff cruise missiles, both vulnerable to Russian and Chinese air defense, along with only 20 penetrating bombers, the B-2. To boot, the planes are concentrated on only a handful of insufficiently hardened bases.

Our sea-based nuclear force, the least-vulnerable leg, for many years included 41 ballistic-missile submarines, SSBNs. These dwindled to 18, then 14, and, with the new Columbia class set to enter service beginning only in 2031, a planned 12. A maximum of six at sea at any one time will face 100 Russian and Chinese hunter-killer subs. At the same time, the oceans are surrendering their opacity to space surveillance and Russian nonacoustic tracking. Even a deeply running sub disturbs the chemical and sea-life balance in ways that via upwelling leave a track upon the surface.

Russia is moving to 13 SSBNs with high-capacity missiles that carry many maneuverable warheads; China, with 4 SSBNs, is only beginning to build. A possible new dimension is Russia’s announced, but as yet unseen, autonomous stealth undersea nuclear vehicle, capable of targeting the high percentage of U.S. population, industry, and infrastructure on the coasts. We have no such weapon and Russia presents no similar vulnerability.

American ballistic-missile defense is severely underdeveloped due to ideological opposition and the misunderstanding of its purpose, which is to protect population and infrastructure as much as possible but, because many warheads will get through, primarily to shield retaliatory capacity so as to make a successful enemy first strike impossible—thus increasing stability rather than decreasing it, as its critics wrongly believe. Starved of money and innovation, missile defense has been confined to midcourse interception, when boost-phase and terminal intercept are also needed. Merely intending this without sufficient funding is useless. As for national resilience, the U.S. long ago gave up any form of civil defense, while Russia and China have not. This reinforces their ideas of nuclear utility, weakens our deterrence, and makes the nuclear calculus that much more unstable. CONTINUE AT SITE