The U.S. Must Re-Focus on Curbing Iran’s Nuclear Program By Lawrence J. Haas

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/us-must-re-focus-curbing-iran%E2%80%99s-nuclear-program-209298

Iran’s latest nuclear and ballistic missile advances make Israel’s war with Hamas and America’s skirmishing with Iranian proxy forces look like regional sideshows of a far more ominous main event.

The current situation in the region gives Iran “a unique opportunity and amplified internal justification for building nuclear weapons while the United States and Israel’s resources to detect and deter Iran from succeeding are stretched thin…,” the Institute for Science and International Security wrote in a new report. “[F]or the first time in years, we are facing the real possibility that Iran may choose to weaponize its nuclear capabilities and build nuclear weapons.”

It wouldn’t take Tehran long to do so. With a large stockpile of uranium enriched to sixty percent purity, the institute estimated that the regime could further enrich enough uranium to weapons-grade purity, with the ability to produce a nuclear bomb in a week. Along with strengthening its nuclear infrastructure through building more reactors, enriching more uranium, and refusing to cooperate with international nuclear inspectors, Tehran also continues to advance its ballistic missiles, which could carry nuclear warheads to strike U.S. allies in the region and possibly even the United States itself. In January, the Islamic Republic launched a satellite 450 miles into space, using technologies with “significant overlap” with those of longer-range ballistic missiles.

The implications of Iran’s nuclear-related advances are enormous. Iran could launch an attack against the United States or Israel, its most hated adversaries. Furthermore, it could also transfer a bomb to a proxy (e.g., Hamas or Hezbollah) to use against Israel or another adversary.

All of this demands U.S.-led action on at least two fronts.

China’s Infiltrators: ‘They Are Coming Here to Kill Us’ Gordon Chang

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20388/china-infiltrators-us

China’s Communist Party is at this moment putting in place the infrastructure in America to attack America.

[I]n Reedley, California, near Fresno, authorities found a secret Chinese biological weapons lab with at least 20 pathogens, including the one for Ebola, and almost a thousand mice that had been genetically engineered to spread disease.

Chinese agents, in addition to hobbling Americans with disease and gunning them down, could bomb power stations, attack military bases, start wildfires, poison reservoirs, or create terror in dozens of ways.

These tactics come straight out of Unrestricted Warfare, a 1999 book written by two Chinese air force colonels and first published by the PLA Literature and Arts Publishing House in Beijing. The colonels argued that China can and should employ any tactic in attacking a militarily superior United States. Now, Americans can see how Beijing is operationalizing the suggestions in this how-to manual.

Chinese attackers are already in America, more are arriving by the day, and they are armed.

Videos posted to X (Twitter) show Chinese migrants firing pistols. One video is of a Chinese female with a sniper rifle.

There is no Second Amendment in China, and Chinese citizens are not permitted to possess firearms. So is it possible that the shooters in the videos are merely taking advantage of a new-found freedom in their new home country ?

Unlikely.

One of the migrants videoed was in America for only three weeks and arrived in the country with no money and no identification.

Contemplating the Unthinkable: Harris 2024 By Jim Geraghty

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/contemplating-the-unthinkable-harris-2024/

EXCERPT:

Kamala Harris’s Chances

Late last week, after President Biden’s disastrous prime-time press conference, our Phil Klein delivered an assessment that sounded insane . . . and yet, in light of recent events, deserves serious consideration: “Democrats would be better off facing Donald Trump with [Kamala] Harris as their presidential nominee than taking their chances with a rapidly declining [Joe] Biden.”

I can hear readers now: Harris is a joke, a liability, a walking disaster who is so self-evidently a weak candidate and leader that not a single prominent Democrat has called upon Biden to announce he’s serving just one term.

But as these past few days have made abundantly clear, Biden’s age is the single biggest problem jeopardizing the Democrats’ chances of keeping the White House. Never mind that a super-majority of Americans thinks Biden is too old to serve another term; a super-majority of Democrats thinks Biden is too old to serve another term, according to the latest polling from ABC News:

According to the poll, conducted using Ipsos’ Knowledge Panel, 86 percent of Americans think Biden, 81, is too old to serve another term as president. That figure includes 59 percent of Americans who think both he and former President Donald Trump, the Republican front-runner, are too old and 27 percent who think only Biden is too old. . . .

73 percent of Democrats think Biden is too old to serve.

This is a problem that cannot be fixed. Biden cannot get younger. There’s something a little sad about Democrats who think that the problem can be solved if the White House and Biden campaign staff just put the president in front of the cameras more:

Top party operatives are warning Biden aides that the president cannot retreat in response to the special counsel report that fueled concerns over his age and mental faculties. They say President Joe Biden, having largely shied away from interviews and press conferences, needs to be out in public far more.

They want to see him engage with the press and voters in the off-script and punchy exchanges he’s been known for in the past, which they believe will help chip away at concerns about the president’s mental acuity. They say that it’s worth the risk of potential slip-ups that could reinforce the image that he’s declining.

Rescued Hostages a Blow to Biden’s Effort to Thwart Israel By Philip Klein

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/rescued-hostages-a-blow-to-bidens-effort-to-thwart-israel/

By carrying out a daring military operation in Rafah that rescued two hostages, Israel sent two important messages to President Biden. One, operations in Rafah are necessary to destroy Hamas. And two, hostages can be secured by military action, and not merely through negotiations that demand Israel abandon its war aims.

As Biden has been cratering in polls and increasingly convinced that he needs to reassure the anti-Israel base of his party, he has taken to lashing out at our ally both privately (by calling Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu an obstinate “a**hole”) and publicly by claiming that Israel’s response to the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust has been “over the top.”

What Biden hopes is that he can convince Israel to swallow a tremendously one-sided hostage deal that would involve Israel releasing many times more Hamas prisoners and agreeing to a cease-fire of several months, with the aim of making it permanent. Israel has made significant progress in dismantling Hamas’s grip on Gaza, but the frenzied negotiations are happening as Israel is preparing to take Rafah, the last major stronghold of the terrorist group.

The Biden administration claimed at the beginning of the war that it supported Israel’s goal of destroying Hamas, but now Biden and his team are trying to kneecap Israel before the job is done. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said that an Israeli operation in Rafah would be a “disaster” and “not something we would support.” Biden just yesterday told Netanyahu, according to a White House–supplied readout, that “a military operation in Rafah should not proceed without a credible and executable plan for ensuring the safety of and support for the more than one million people sheltering there.

How Xi Misreads the Taiwan Battlefield Frank Mount

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/11/how-xi-misreads-the-taiwan-battlefield/

In any war between China on the one hand and Taiwan, Japan, the US and their allies on the other, Chinese vessels of all kinds will be prevented from significant access to the Pacific Ocean. The Chinese (and Russian) Pacific fleets will almost certainly be enclosed in their coastal waters.

This is because the First Island Chain running parallel to the mainland from Sakhalin Island in the north down through Japan, the Ryukyu islands, Taiwan, and on to the Philippine Islands and Indonesia, is a natural barrier now being fortified by the Japanese and Taiwanese militaries and the US Marines. The Commander of the US Marine Corps, General David Berger, recently announced that the Marines were changing their policies and missions in reaction to developments in Asia. He said a “new mission” for the Marines would be “island hopping” in the Indo-Pacific armed with anti-ship missiles to meet the growing China threat. (see The Times, London dispatch, Weekend Australian 6-7/11/21). Presumably, they would carry Tomahawk anti-ship missiles and be supported by US specifically designed shallow-hulled coastal patrol vessels, armed with the same Tomahawks, as well as Japanese submarines.

This would make transit through the Chain almost impossible for hostile surface ships and submarines. One of the difficulties for Chinese and Russian submarines is the difference between the relatively shallow waters of the seas between mainland China and the First Island Chain and the vast depths and trenches of the Pacific Ocean east of the Chain. Submarines would have to surface or near surface to transit the Chain either way, making them easily detectable and vulnerable.

Furthermore, at the southern end of the Chain, other US forces along with the navies of Australia, France, Britain and hopefully India and Indonesia could block Chinese and Russian naval and merchant shipping transiting the Malacca Strait and contiguous Indonesian waterways and passages. As a result, China could suffer a serious trade blockade.

As I argued in an earlier article in Quadrant (April 2021), Taiwan is a key link in the First Island Chain and its conquest by China would constitute an existential threat to Japan. Over many decades Japan has sought to preserve and strengthen the Chain as a protective instrument. If China took control of Taiwan it would gain access to the North Pacific and be able to surround Japan, which is a nation lacking geographical strategic depth. A China attack on Taiwan would lead to a Third Sino-Japanese War and the US would be obliged to support Japan (and therefore Taiwan) under the US-Japan Mutual Defense and Security Treaty. China’s recent threats to Taiwan have led to Japan announcing it would double its defence expenditure and invest heavily in new technology including robots and drones. Twenty years ago, China openly and seriously threatened Taiwan and, as a result, Japan immediately intensified its pressure on the US, imploring it to provide ABM (anti-ballistic missile) protection against China with the latest in US technology. The result was the 2004 US-Japan ABM Agreement which presumably also covered Taiwan (see below).

While many of us were discussing the possibilities of the “looming war over Taiwan”, the AUKUS agreement was announced on September 16, 2021. The major aspect of this agreement was the decision by the US, the UK and Australia to build at least eight nuclear-powered submarines (SSNs) for Australia. Initially, nothing much else was mentioned, at least not in the press.

Biden: Too Demented to Be Found Guilty of Crimes But not too demented to be president? by Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-too-demented-to-be-found-guilty-of-crimes/

Special Counsel Robert Hur just found Joe Biden was guilty of violating national security laws in removing classified documents— after examining then Senator and Vice President Biden’s some 15-year habit of removing classified files to his offices and residences, where they were stored in unsecured fashion.

Period. End of story.

Hur then, as a disinterested Special Counsel, not a local county prosecutor on a limited budget, logically would have indicted and prosecuted Biden. It really is a jury’s decision to determine whether Biden was guilty or innocent, or whether he is pardoned/exempted by reason of dementia.

It is not the role of Hur, as a prosecutor and advocate for the state, to imagine how difficult his case might be to prove someone so incapacitated like Biden was guilty, as Hur’s own research and investigations had otherwise indicated that he was.

Is mindset, intention, or mental status a normal consideration of violations of national security laws, or is it the act itself? So we are back to the James Comey defense:

Hillary was guilty but in Lord and Savior Comey’s judgement no jury would likely convict a presidential candidate of such stature of violating national security laws. (After her reprieve, Hillary immediately claimed such extenuating circumstances were proof of her innocence. And Biden in a nanosecond likewise claimed he is now exonerated too, as was the administration’s plan all along).

Finally note the following:

1) The Left, Hur, and others believe that someone who has lost his faculties and who would not be allowed to drive a semi-truck, teach a class, diagnose a patient, argue a case, wire a house, or cook a hamburger is nevertheless fit enough to run the United States of America.

Dems Roll Out Welcome Mat for World’s Criminals We’re the suckers. Betsy McCaughey

https://www.frontpagemag.com/dems-roll-out-welcome-mat-for-worlds-criminals/

Maria Manaura, who’s been arrested at least eight times in the six months since she arrived in New York City from Venezuela, is living at the Row NYC hotel, once hailed for its unbeatable Times Square location and front-row view of the theater district. Now it’s drug-infested and violent, but still costs taxpayers $500 a night for each of the 1,300 rooms given over to migrants.

Manaura was busted again Jan. 30 for snatching a woman’s cellphone on the No. 6 train. She was charged with grand larceny and resisting arrest, but instead of getting locked up, Judge Jay Weiner granted supervised release, likely in time for her to make it back to the hotel and another prepared meal paid for by you and me. It’s sickening.

Migrants like Manaura who rack up clashes with police should be made ineligible for the city’s largesse. Handing out hotel rooms and free meals to repeat thugs makes it easier for them to commit crimes and makes us into patsies.

The Democratic Party is turning New York City into a Shangri-La for international theft rings and migrants here to rob and burglarize. Taxpayers foot the bill for the thieves’ hotel accommodations, plus three meals a day and a long list of other benefits, even free bus tickets if they have to skip town in a hurry. If you’re a criminal, what’s not to like?

This stupidity isn’t new. For over a year, New York City has coddled criminal migrants with long rap sheets, sheltering and feeding them while they continue their crime spree.

Do Leftists Now Believe Leftism Doesn’t Work? Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2024/02/12/do-leftists-now-believe-leftism-doesnt-work/

It is hard to destroy a naturally beautiful city like San Francisco, with ideal weather and stunning infrastructure inherited from far better earlier generations.

Yet San Francisco continues its much-publicized and self-inflicted doom loop. The productive classes still flee the increasingly crime-ridden city and its self-induced pathologies. The city is eroding not because of the doomsayers and not because of what people say about San Francisco, but because of what San Franciscans have done to San Francisco.

In 2023, more than 40,000 crimes were reportedly committed in San Francisco. The great majority of the perpetrators were either not arrested or never jailed, indicted, or convicted.

Downtown office vacancy rates exceed 35 percent—and are climbing. Tourists have ostracized the city, given the thousands of homeless that occupy sidewalks and downtown. San Francisco claimed to be on the cutting-edge of the woke green movement, proud that it had enacted the most stringent environmental laws and regulations in the world—except when it came to defecation, injection, and urination on the sidewalks, doorways, and parks and during storms, when the toxic, effluviant human waste escapes sewage treatment and flows into the once-cherished bay.

In a mere five years, the city went from being one of the most envied and wealthy in the world with a vibrant nightlife and new high-tech start-ups to a West-Cost Detroit.

Now billionaires are trying to heal San Francisco by returning it to the old normality in the era before the progressive city councils, the boards of supervisors, and mayors defunded the police, allowed the homeless to absorb the downtown, and promoted prosecutors who refused to enforce the laws.

The rich are rallying to undo the damage wrought by the very officials whom they and the majority of the city voted into office. Their principles seem simple—start doing the very opposite of the progressive agenda: enforce laws; arrest, convict, and incarcerate criminals; balance city budgets; and insist that the homeless leave the streets, follow the laws of the city, and relocate to shelters.

Monstrous complicity As UN links to Hamas are revealed, the BBC-led media airbrush these away Melanie Phillips

https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/monstrous-complicity?utm_campaign=email-post&r=8t06w&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

In a sane universe, the discovery of a Hamas data centre and server farm in a tunnel 700 metres long and 18 metres deep directly underneath the headquarters of the UN Works and Relief Agency in Gaza would be of huge significance.

Ariel Kahana reported in Israel Hayom:

I saw with my own eyes the cables connecting UNRWA’s communication room on the first floor of the building to Hamas’ server room exactly underneath it.

Did Thomas White, UNRWA Gaza director since the summer of 2021, not notice the trucks removing soil for years from the compound he managed? Did he not wonder who the people walking around his headquarters were when he didn’t employ them? Was he not puzzled by the computers, air conditioners, servers, batteries, cement mixers, cables, tiles, steel doors, and even the motorcycles that arrived in his backyard without him ordering them? Did he not notice the fibers that very strangely dangled from his communication room to an unknown destination underground? Did he never once have a doubt that made him think to report to his superiors at the UN?…

The UNRWA headquarters above ground and Hamas’ “brain” below ground are a physical reality connected by thick cables, and not just as a metaphor…After we again sank into the mud, crawled through the tunnel, walked hunched over for hundreds of meters, and came out into Gaza’s trembling skies, the IDF APCs brought us to UNRWA’s headquarters. There, among offices, schools, kindergartens, and SpongeBob drawings, the commander of 401st Brigade, Col. Benny Aharon, shows us the agency’s own server room.

“We’re in UNRWA’s server room. Coincidentally — I say this cynically — it’s located right above the server room you found underground,” he says. “Notice that all the cables are ripped and disconnected, they left almost nothing, only what they managed to cut off. We’re lucky a few cables remained that they didn’t manage to cut off some of the cables that going down below. They took out all the DVRs and computers from here. Only someone who has something to hide does something like this. What kind of international humanitarian organisation that only has good intentions behaves this way?”

The stalemate on illegal immigration The deadlock is part of even bigger problems Charles Lipson

https://thespectator.com/topic/stalemate-illegal-immigration-border-crime/

Few moments are less promising to reach a bipartisan deal than the months before a presidential election. And few issues present greater obstacles than limiting illegal immigration. Even the word “illegal” is contested. Progressives say it is too harsh. Conservatives say it is simply truthful.

It is no surprise, then, that the compromise “border-security bill” gasped its final breath this week. The Senate bill, negotiated by a Democrat, a Republican and an Independent, met a hostile reception as soon as the text was released. House Speaker Mike Johnson declared it “dead on arrival.” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer reluctantly brought it up for a procedural vote, where it went down in flames.

Why such stiff opposition? Because the bill contains not one but two divisive issues. The first is that the “immigration bill” also funds Ukraine’s war with Russia and, to a lesser extent, Israel’s war with Hamas and Hezbollah. Funding for Israel has broad support, but funding for Ukraine does not. There is considerable opposition among Republicans and some progressive Democrats to giving Ukraine another $60 billion. (Faced with the defeat of the combined bill, Schumer is considering a separate package to fund Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, with no mention of immigration.)

The second problem goes to the heart of the immigration bill. It includes provisions that would allow some 5,000 to 8,000 migrants to cross illegally into the US each day before tougher restrictions kick in.

Almost every Republican, including many moderates, are appalled by those numbers. They remember when President Obama’s secretary of Homeland Security called 1,000 illegal crossings per day a crisis. If that was a crisis, they say, what do you call five- to eight-times that many?