Donald Trump oversaw some scary moments in international politics. The former president seriously escalated tensions with North Korea and Iran, leading to several war scares. But he pulled back from the brink, sometimes against the wishes of his more hawkish advisers. He avoided a direct U.S.-Iranian war and opened a direct line of communication with North Korea.

Democrats seem to wish he'd gone to war instead. The Democratic National Committee's 2024 platform, approved in a symbolic vote on Monday night, tries to outhawk Trump, denouncing his "fecklessness" on Iran and his "love letters" to North Korea. Although the platform condemns Trump for pulling out of diplomacy with Iran, it also attacks his decisions not to bomb Iran at several crucial points.

Ironically, the Democratic platform is not much different from Republicans' own attacks on the Biden administration. Each side accuses the other of weakness, and neither wants to take credit for diplomacy or own the compromises necessary to avoid war.

It's easy to forget now, but in 2017 the Korean peninsula had become a remarkably tense place. North Korea was testing nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of hitting U.S. soil. The U.S. military was massing forces in the region, and Trump was issuing threats.

Trump's national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, reportedly called for a military attack aimed at giving North Korea a "bloody nose." McMaster and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) publicly warned that war might be inevitable.

And then, in January 2018, a false alarm drove home the lesson that nuclear war is nothing to play around with. During a disaster preparedness drill, authorities in Hawaii accidentally sent an alert about an incoming ballistic missile. For more than half an hour, Hawaiians and tourists were convinced that they were going to die in a nuclear war.

A few months later, McMaster was out of the White House. Trump accepted an invitation to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in June 2018. Trump met Kim again in February 2019. Stepping over the North Korean–South Korean border in June 2019, Trump became the first U.S. president to visit North Korea.

The meetings failed to secure a permanent agreement—it didn't help that McMaster's replacement, John Bolton, publicly hinted that denuclearization would end in Kim's violent death—but they bought some crucial breathing room.

The Democrats' 2024 platform attacks the very idea of talks with North Korea. Trump's approach, the platform says, was "embarrassing the United States on the world stage including by flattering and legitimizing Kim Jong Un, exchanging 'love letters' with the North Korean dictator."

This isn't a break with past Democratic rhetoric. During the presidential debates in 2019, then-candidate Joe Biden said that Trump gave "North Korea everything they wanted, creating the legitimacy by having a meeting with Kim Jong Un." Another candidate, Kamala Harris, said that there are "no concessions to be made. He has traded a photo op for nothing."

If even talking to North Korea is a "concession," then it's hard to see what alternative Harris would accept, other than continuing to barrel towards nuclear war.

Iran, unlike North Korea, does not have nuclear weapons. In 2017, Trump tore up an international agreement that regulated Iranian nuclear activities, instead betting on a "maximum pressure" campaign designed to overthrow the Iranian government by cutting off its oil exports. Bolton later said in his memoir that "only regime change would ultimately prevent Iran from possessing nuclear weapons," and then–Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was obsessed with killing the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani.

The Iranian government did not react warmly to the maximum pressure campaign. Iranian forces encouraged rocket attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq, and Iran is believed to be behind sabotage attacks on the international oil industry, including a September 2019 drone strike on Saudi oil infrastructure.

The U.S. military massed forces off the coast of Iran during this time. On June 19, 2019, Iran shot down an American surveillance drone. (The two countries disagree on whether the drone was in Iranian airspace.) Trump ordered a bombing raid on Iranian air defense batteries, then pulled back at the last minute, because killing Iranian troops was "not proportionate to shooting down an unmanned drone."

Although the Democratic platform calls maximum pressure a "reckless and short-sighted decision," it also attacks Trump for failing to hit Iran back at each of these points. "Trump's only response" to an Iraqi militia attack on the U.S. consulate in Basra "was to close our diplomatic facility," the Democrats complain, and "Trump failed to respond against Iran or its proxies" for the attack on Saudi oil facilities.

The platform is somewhat ambiguous on whether Trump should have bombed Iran in June 2019. "Trump responded by tweet and then abruptly called off any actual retaliation, causing confusion and concern among his own national security team," it says. Perhaps putting American lives at risk to avenge the honor of a robot would be too far even for the Biden team.

Maximum pressure reached its climax in January 2020, when Trump followed Pompeo's advice and ordered the military to assassinate Soleimani. Iran responded by launching 12 ballistic missiles at a U.S. base in Iraq, which injured Americans but did not kill anyone. Trump called it even, claiming that "Iran appears to be standing down, which is a good thing for all parties concerned."

At the time, Democrats were highly critical of the decision to risk war by killing an Iranian officer. "Trump just tossed a stick of dynamite into a tinderbox," Biden wrote right after Soleimani was assassinated. After the Iranian retaliation, Democrats immediately put forward a war powers resolution making it clear that the president does not have the authority to start a war with Iran.

The current Democratic platform takes a different tone. When "Iran, for the first and only time in its history, directly launched ballistic missiles against U.S. troops," the document declares disapprovingly, Trump "again took no action." The platform criticizes Trump for making light of U.S. troops' brain injuries without mentioning the assassination that prompted the Iranian attacks in the first place.

After all, it would be hard for Biden to criticize Trump for bringing America to the brink of war in the Middle East when he has done the same.

After four short years of a Democratic administration, the mood among Democratic leaders has gotten more hawkish, especially as the defense of Ukraine gives them a "good war" to rally behind. But that's not necessarily how the American people, including Democratic voters, feel. Direct talks with North Korea are still popular, and direct war with Iran is still unpopular. Republicans and independents are less likely to call themselves hawks than in 2014, and even Democratic voters are only one percentage point more likely to consider themselves hawkish than before.

There is a public appetite for diplomacy and deescalation. But party leaders don't seem to want to take the opportunity. They would prefer to fight over who can outhawk whom.

The post Democratic Platform Attacks Trump for Not Going to War appeared first on Reason.com.

Despite an authoritarian regime's efforts to obstruct free and fair elections, Venezuelans turned out in large numbers to vote for their president last Sunday, hoping for change amid widespread political repression and a humanitarian crisis. The U.S. is deeply implicated in this turmoil, as the disputed election results underscore significant geopolitical stakes and can have a significant impact on American interests.

A government-controlled electoral commission declared Nicolás Maduro the winner of the election, claiming he received 51 percent of the votes. Yet exit polls and tallies by the opposition indicate that over 70 percent of Venezuelans supported the opposition candidate, Edmundo González.

Governments around the world have denounced the election as fraudulent and demanded evidence of Maduro's claimed victory. Leaders such as Argentine President Javier Milei and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni have expressed their solidarity with the Venezuelan people's desire for change. 

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has echoed these concerns, claiming that the election results do not reflect the true will of the Venezuelan people. On Thursday, Blinken affirmed that the U.S. recognizes González as the legitimate winner of the Venezuelan elections.

Even left-wing governments like Brazil and Colombia are pressing Maduro to substantiate his claim of victory, but no such proof has emerged. In a bigger turn of events, the Carter Center, one of the few entities invited to observe the Venezuelan election, condemned the electoral commission for its lack of transparency. 

Protests erupted nationwide in response to the disputed election, with thousands taking to the streets. Several statues of former socialist president Hugo Chávez were toppled in the unrest. Clashes with security forces have resulted in hundreds of arrests and at least 17 deaths. 

Strategic Concerns for the U.S.

Supporting the democratic aspirations of Venezuelans is crucial for U.S. interests. A free Venezuela will address key U.S. policy concerns such as the rise in illegal migration, untapped market opportunities, the growing influence of Iran and China in the region, and security risks for international commerce in the region.

Should Maduro remain in power, migration to the United States from Venezuela is expected to surge. Surveys show that over 40 percent of Venezuelans plan to leave the country if Maduro continues as president. This potential influx of refugees could strain U.S. immigration systems and social infrastructure, posing a major humanitarian and logistical challenge.

American firms will also miss out on substantial business opportunities in Venezuela if Maduro stays in power. The country's vast reserves of oil and uranium represent untapped markets that could enhance U.S. energy security. Investing in Venezuela's oil industry could help diversify energy sources and reduce dependency on unstable or unfriendly regions, leading to more stable energy prices and a reliable supply of oil for the U.S. market. 

Maduro's continued rule will also likely increase the presence of U.S. adversaries such as Russia, Iran, and China in the region. Iran plans to expand trade with Venezuela to $20 billion per year, China is heavily investing in the country, and Russia has signed multiple military agreements with the South American country. As Venezuela continues to distance itself from the democratic world, one can only expect these relationships to strengthen. And having a rogue state relatively close to the U.S. border represents security concerns to American businesses and international trade in general. 

To address these challenges, American policy makers need to adopt a more strategic approach. The current administration has focused on negotiating sanction relief for the Maduro regime in exchange for promises to hold free and fair elections. But this has proven insufficient, producing no positive changes in Maduro's behavior.

A new foreign policy approach should include a reassessment of institutions such as the United Nations and the Organization of American States. For years, these institutions have systematically failed to uphold the rule of law and human rights in Venezuela. Additionally, U.S. policy makers should establish measures to prevent regimes from exploiting international treaties and cooperation agreements. This includes sectors like finance and energy, where regimes have undermined democratic nations' interests. Finally, the methodology and effectiveness of sanctions should be reassessed. Despite a series of sanctions imposed by the U.S. on countries like Venezuela, Russia, and Iran, the International Monetary Fund projects economic growth for all these nations in 2024.

Failure to address these issues risks empowering autocrats around the world, jeopardizing U.S. national security, economic performance, and diplomatic standing.

The post Maduro Is Bad for Venezuela and Bad for the U.S. appeared first on Reason.com.

Israeli victories: Yesterday, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said its airstrikes in mid-July killed Mohammed Deif, a key Hamas operative and one of the masterminds behind the October 7 attacks.

On Wednesday, Ismail Haniyeh, another senior Hamas official, was killed by a bomb smuggled into a guesthouse in Tehran, Iran. Israel has claimed responsibility for the attack. "The bomb had been hidden approximately two months ago in the guesthouse, according to five of the Middle Eastern officials," reports The New York Times, also noting that it was detonated remotely. "The guesthouse is run and protected by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and is part of a large compound, known as Neshat, in an upscale neighborhood of northern Tehran."

A third victory for Israel was notched this week, with the killing of Fuad Shukr, a senior Hezbollah operative, who was killed in a strike on Beirut.

Back in April, an Israeli hit on Iranian officials in Syria led to direct strikes being exchanged, though they were showy in nature, designed more to make a statement than to actually do intense damage. Now, it remains to be seen how these groups—proxies of Iran—will respond to Israel's success in taking out these targets, as well as the fact that Haniyeh was taken out in Tehran.

"Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has issued an order for Iran to strike Israel directly, in retaliation for the killing of Mr. Haniyeh in Tehran, according to three Iranian officials briefed on the order," reports the Times. "It is unclear how forcefully Iran will respond, and whether it will calibrate its attack to steer clear of escalation, as it did in April with a barrage of missiles and drones that was telegraphed well in advance."

"We are on the verge of a large, large-scale escalation," Danny Citrinowicz, who used to helm the Iran branch for Israeli military intelligence, told The Wall Street Journal. "Iran is leading the axis, and they cannot protect one of the leaders of the axis coming for [incoming President Masoud] Pezeshkian's inauguration."

Now, President Joe Biden's administration claims it is hard at work deescalating tensions in the Middle East to stave off war. But, for those who've been following domestic politics, questions remain about the degree to which Biden—the 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. workday president—is even capable of handling a pressing foreign policy issue such as this one.

Scenes from New York: "Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Lyle Frank ruled on Thursday that the Council lacked the authority to expand access to the CityFHEPS voucher program for people facing eviction or homelessness to New Yorkers who earn above what current rules allow," reports Gothamist. "Tenants who receive CityFHEPS assistance typically pay 30% of their income toward rent, and city-funded vouchers cover the rest."

QUICK HITS

• "Brazil's Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has found himself at the forefront of Venezuela's crisis after [Nicolas] Maduro declared himself the victor of an election his opponents say was fraudulent," reports Bloomberg. "The dispute and Maduro's subsequent crackdown on dissent have thrust the leader of Latin America's largest nation into an increasingly uncomfortable position. The Venezuelan president is an old ally who still has the support of many within Lula's leftist Workers' Party, which endorsed Maduro's victory this week. The opposition and the growing list of global leaders who back it, meanwhile, have appealed to Lula's efforts to paint himself as a defender of democracy, especially after he rallied international support for fair elections in his own race just two years ago."
• For this week's Just Asking Questions release, we interviewed Vivek Ramaswamy (beware, there were technical issues so the quality is suboptimal at times):

• Blake Masters defeated in Arizona:

BREAKING: Abraham Hamadeh wins Republican nomination for U.S. House in Arizona's 8th Congressional District. #APRaceCall at 5:27 p.m. MST. https://t.co/FjgpZFcJ4E

— AP Politics (@AP_Politics) August 1, 2024

• Several journalists, including The Wall Street Journal's Evan Gershkovich, were just released from Russian prison in a swap. In total, 16 people were returned to America and European allies while eight were returned to Russia.

The @WSJ's piece about the secret negotiations to free Evan Gershkovich ends with an incredible anecdote: pic.twitter.com/wM7aWu44tu

— David Gura (@davidgura) August 1, 2024

The post The IDF's Big Week appeared first on Reason.com.

This week has been especially chaotic for the Middle East. On Saturday, a Lebanese rocket killed 12 children and youth at a soccer game in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights. (The victims were Syrian citizens with Israeli residency.) On Tuesday night, Israel took revenge for the rocket by killing Fuad Shukr, a commander in the pro-Iranian militia Hezbollah, along with two children.

A few hours later, a bomb killed Ismail Haniyeh, the head of Hamas' political bureau and the lead negotiator with Israel, while he was visiting Tehran for the Iranian president's inauguration. Israel is widely believed to be the culprit. Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah have both promised to take revenge.

The same night that Shukr and Haniyeh were killed, U.S. warplanes rained down fire on an Iraqi militia base, killing four pro-Iranian fighters. An anonymous U.S. official told reporters that the militiamen were launching an attack drone that "posed a threat" to U.S. and allied forces. It was not clear whether the Iraqi drone was really aimed at U.S. troops—or Israel.

Soon it may not matter. The Biden administration affirmed again on Wednesday that it will help defend Israel in case of a conflict with Lebanon or Iran, as it did during clashes this April. And the administration has hinted before that it will get involved directly if Israel faces military setbacks in Lebanon. Israeli leaders may have been betting on exactly that outcome.

Unnamed "sources in the security establishment" told The Jerusalem Post that they could have assassinated Haniyeh in Qatar, where he usually lives. Instead, those sources explained, "the choice to carry out the assassination in the heart of Tehran was precisely because Haniyeh was under Iranian security responsibility, which placed Iran at the heart of the world's focus as a host, director, and supplier of terrorism."

In other words, killing Haniyeh was possibly meant to turn the Israel-Hamas war into an international crisis involving Iran and Israel's allies.

Months before the October 2023 attacks, Israeli policy makers had gamed out an Israeli strike leading to a U.S.-Iranian war. The Institute for National Security Studies, a think tank close to the Israeli government, ran a simulation in July 2023 that was eerily similar to the current escalation. The scenario began with an Israeli assassination campaign in Tehran, which provoked Hezbollah and Iraqi militias into attacking Israel and ended with direct U.S. attacks on Iran.

"Former top political and military leaders from Israel, the United States and a number of European countries took part in the simulation," reported the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

For years before that, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders had been demanding U.S. support for an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities. It's not hard to understand why. Khamenei has called Israel a cancerous tumor that needs to be excised, and Israeli leaders have in turn said that Iran is the head of an evil octopus, which must be cut off.

The attacks on October 7, 2023, by Hamas seemed to confirm the Israeli perception. Whatever role Iran did or didn't have in planning the attacks—the U.S. government believes that Iranian leaders were just as surprised as everyone else—Iran's allies immediately jumped into the fray, attacking Israel in the name of the Palestinian cause.

And plenty of American politicians want conflict for their own reasons. Immediately after the October 7 attacks, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) had called for bombing Iran whether or not there was evidence that Iran was behind the attacks. On Wednesday, he claimed to have intelligence that "Iran will, in the coming weeks or months, possess a nuclear weapon" and introduced a bill calling for war with Iran.

A conflict with Iran also helps Netanyahu alleviate some of the domestic political pressure on him. Before the October 7 attacks, he was facing protests over his proposal to defang the Israeli Supreme Court. And instead of rallying Israelis around Netanyahu, the attacks galvanized opposition, as many Israelis blamed Netanyahu for the security lapse and the failure to rescue hostages.

This week, those tensions exploded into an outright mutiny. After months of international pressure regarding the treatment of inmates at the Sde Teiman prison, Israeli military police began a probe into one of the most egregious cases. Nine soldiers had allegedly raped a Palestinian prisoner so hard that he was sent to the hospital with a ruptured bowel, a severe injury to his anus, lung damage, and broken ribs.

Police detained some of the accused soldiers, and Israeli nationalists accused the government of betraying its troops. Nationalist rioters, including members of parliament, stormed both Sde Teiman and the Beit Lid military courts in support of the accused rapists. The army was forced to pull three battalions away from the Palestinian territories to guard the courthouse.

Killing Shukr and Haniyeh, then, was a good political bet for Netanyahu. At the very least, Netanyahu got to drown out headlines about the Sde Teiman riot with a dashing military victory. And if Iran hits back hard enough, then Israel may be able to get the world's superpower to fight Israel's greatest enemy.

But a full-on U.S.-Iran war would be a disaster for the region and for Americans. Gen. Kenneth McKenzie warned The New Yorker in December 2021 that Iran has missile "overmatch in the theatre—the ability to overwhelm" U.S. air defenses. American troops would face attacks in Iran, Iraq, and Syria, and a few well-placed Iranian strikes on Tel Aviv or Abu Dhabi could do serious damage to the world economy.

It would be a disaster of the Biden administration's own making. Soon after the October 7 attacks, President Joe Biden embraced the "bear hug" theory of diplomacy. By giving Israel public reassurances and unlimited military support, the theory went, Biden would earn enough goodwill from Israelis to keep their war contained and eventually broker an Israeli-Palestinian ceasefire.

Instead, the bear hug has turned out to be a sleepwalk. Netanyahu has taken U.S. support as a license to continue expanding the conflict. And the Biden administration seems to be at a loss for words about the latest escalation. Asked what impact the assassination of one side's chief negotiator would have on ceasefire negotiations, Secretary of State Antony Blinken played dumb.

"Well, I've seen the reports, and what I can tell you is this: First, this is something we were not aware of or involved in," Blinken told Channel News Asia. "It's very hard to speculate, and I've learned never to speculate, on the impact one event may have on something else. So I can't tell you what this means."

The post Will Biden Sleepwalk Into a War With Iran? appeared first on Reason.com.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. won applause at the Libertarian National Convention by criticizing government lockdowns and deficit spending, and saying America shouldn't police the world.

It made me want to interview him. This month, I did.

He said intelligent things about America's growing debt:

"President Trump said that he was going to balance the budget and instead he (increased the debt more) than every president in United States history—$8 trillion. President Biden is on track now to beat him."

It's good to hear a candidate actually talk about our debt.

"When the debt is this large…you have to cut dramatically, and I'm going to do that," he says.

But looking at his campaign promises, I don't see it.

He promises "affordable" housing via a federal program backing 3 percent mortgages.

"Imagine that you had a rich uncle who was willing to cosign your mortgage!" gushes his campaign ad. "I'm going to make Uncle Sam that rich uncle!"

I point out that such giveaways won't reduce our debt.

"That's not a giveaway," Kennedy replies. "Every dollar that I spend as president is going to go toward building our economy."

That's big government nonsense, like his other claim: "Every million dollars we spend on child care creates 22 jobs!"

Give me a break.

When I pressed him about specific cuts, Kennedy says, "I'll cut the military in half…cut it to about $500 billion….We are not the policemen of the world."

"Stop giving any money to Ukraine?" I ask.

"Negotiate a peace," Kennedy replies. "Biden has never talked to Putin about this, and it's criminal."

He never answered whether he'd give money to Ukraine. He did answer about Israel.

"Yes, of course we should,"

"[Since] you don't want to cut this spending, what would you cut?"

"Israel spending is rather minor," he responds. "I'm going to pick the most wasteful programs, put them all in one bill, and send them to Congress with an up and down vote."

Of course, Congress would just vote it down.

Kennedy's proposed cuts would hardly slow down our path to bankruptcy. Especially since he also wants new spending that activists pretend will reduce climate change.

At a concert years ago, he smeared "crisis" skeptics like me, who believe we can adjust to climate change, screaming at the audience, "Next time you see John Stossel and [others]… these flat-earthers, these corporate toadies—lying to you. This is treason, and we need to start treating them now as traitors!"

Now, sitting with him, I ask, "You want to have me executed for treason?"

"That statement," he replies, "it's not a statement that I would make today….Climate is existential. I think it's human-caused climate change. But I don't insist other people believe that. I'm arguing for free markets and then the lowest cost providers should prevail in the marketplace….We should end all subsidies and let the market dictate."

That sounds good: "Let the market dictate."

But wait, Kennedy makes money from solar farms backed by government guaranteed loans. He "leaned on his contacts in the Obama administration to secure a $1.6 billion loan guarantee," wrote The New York Times.

"Why should you get a government subsidy?" I ask.

"If you're creating a new industry," he replies, "you're competing with the Chinese. You want the United States to own pieces of that industry."

I suppose that means his government would subsidize every industry leftists like.

Yet when a wind farm company proposed building one near his family's home, he opposed it.

"Seems hypocritical," I say.

"We're exterminating the right whale in the North Atlantic through these wind farms!" he replies.

I think he was more honest years ago, when he complained that "turbines…would be seen from Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard… Nantucket….[They] will steal the stars and nighttime views."

Kennedy was once a Democrat, but now Democrats sue to keep him off ballots. Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich calls him a "dangerous nutcase."

Kennedy complains that Reich won't debate him.

"Nobody will," he says. "They won't have me on any of their networks."

Well, obviously, I will.

I especially wanted to confront him about vaccines.

In a future column, Stossel TV will post more from our hourlong discussion.

COPYRIGHT 2024 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.

The post RFK Jr. Pays Lip Service to the Debt While Pushing Policies That Would Increase It appeared first on Reason.com.

On March 14, 2024, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.), a man who 13 months prior had vowed at Jerusalem's Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center that "as long as Hashem breathes air into my lungs, the United States Senate will stand behind Israel with our fullest support," peered solemnly over his glasses into the Senate's C-SPAN cameras and informed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that it was time for him to go.

"The Netanyahu coalition no longer fits the needs of Israel after October 7," Schumer declared, referring to the shock Hamas massacre and mass kidnapping event just across the militarized border separating the Palestinian Gaza Strip from the Israeli envelope around it. "Nobody expects Prime Minister Netanyahu to do the things that must be done to break the cycle of violence, preserve Israel's credibility on the world stage, and work towards a two-state solution….At this critical juncture, I believe a new election is the only way to allow for a healthy and open decision-making process about the future of Israel."

And if Netanyahu, in such an election, were to win enough votes to form another government, then continue prosecuting the war against Israel's attackers in ways Schumer doesn't approve?

"Then," the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in U.S. history warned, "the United States will have no choice but to play a more active role in shaping Israeli policy by using our leverage to change the present course."

It's an increasingly common refrain among American critics of Israeli policy, including many who are otherwise wary of Washington thumbing the scales on world affairs: The $3.8 billion that the U.S. gives each year should directly influence Israeli behavior—on war, on humanitarian assistance to Gaza, on settlements in the West Bank, even on proposed reforms to the judiciary branch—or be withdrawn.

"The Netanyahu government, or hopefully a new Israeli government, must understand that not one penny will be coming to Israel from the U.S. unless there is a fundamental change in their military and political positions," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) said last November, reiterating a critique he and several other candidates made when seeking the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.

President Joe Biden, a stalwart supporter of Israel throughout his half-century in public office, seemed this spring to be moving closer to Sanders' point of view. Three days before Schumer's well-telegraphed speech, Politico reported, based on "four U.S. officials with knowledge of internal administration thinking," that Biden "will consider conditioning military aid to Israel if the country moves forward with a large-scale invasion of Rafah."

The Rafah offensive was indeed tabled a few days later. But then, after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on April 1 pulverized a World Central Kitchen aid convoy in Gaza, killing seven, Biden informed Netanyahu in a tense phone call that (in the words of a White House readout) Israel needed to "announce and implement a series of specific, concrete, and measurable steps to address civilian harm, humanitarian suffering, and the safety of aid workers," or else, for the first time in a generation, the U.S. would hold up military aid.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) and three dozen other members of Congress sent a letter to the president April 5 urging him "to reconsider your recent decision to authorize the transfer of a new arms package to Israel, and to withhold this and any future offensive arms transfers until a full investigation into the airstrike is completed." NBC declared this a potential "turning point" in U.S.-Israeli relations.

But that turn lasted fewer than 10 days. On April 14, Iran fired more than 300 potentially lethal missiles and drones into Israel, marking the first time the Islamic republic had directly attacked the Jewish state, after decades of supporting proxy harassments from Hamas, Lebanon's Hezbollah, Yemen's Houthis, and various armed factions in Syria and Iraq. Largely thanks to the technological and regional military agreements that the U.S. and Israel have jointly forged, virtually all of the projectiles that did not misfire were intercepted.

"Now is not the time to abandon our friends. The House must pass urgent national-security legislation for…Israel, as well as desperately needed humanitarian aid for Palestinians in Gaza," Biden wrote in The Wall Street Journal three days later, in support of a supplemental $26.38 billion Israeli package. "I've been clear about my concerns over the safety of civilians in Gaza amid the war with Hamas, but this aid…is focused on Israel's long-term defensive needs to ensure it can maintain its military edge against Iran or any other adversary."

That same day, after months of delay, embattled House Speaker Mike Johnson (R–La.) announced that the aid bill would finally be introduced on the House floor. The only attached condition was imposed not on Israeli policy makers but on the controversial United Nations Relief and Works Agency operation in Gaza. So much for a turning point.

Yet the conversation about leverage is precisely the one America needs to be having while confronting yet another deadly and seemingly intractable standoff in the Middle East. A realistic contemplation of Washington's regional and global system of carrots and sticks, at a time when American imperial appetites are on the noticeable decline, might reveal some awkward if potentially game-changing truths. Beginning with: There are many on the pro-Israeli side who want the same policy result as Bernie Sanders, for precisely the opposite reasons.

End it, Don't Mend it

Three months before the October 7 massacre, the American Jewish publication Tablet published a provocative essay by Jacob Siegel and Liel Leibovitz bluntly headlined "End U.S. Aid to Israel."

The brief: "Israel ends up sacrificing far more value in return for the nearly $4 billion it annually receives from Washington. That's because nearly all military aid to Israel…consists of credits that go directly from the Pentagon to U.S. weapons manufacturers," they wrote. "In return, American payouts undermine Israel's domestic defense industry, weaken its economy, and compromise the country's autonomy—giving Washington veto power over everything from Israeli weapons sales to diplomatic and military strategy."

Critics of Israel, particularly in light of the subsequent war with Hamas, will surely blanch at the notion that Washington has anything like "veto power" over Tel Aviv. Yet America has nonetheless coordinated and consulted on policy far more closely with Israel, including during this conflict, than it has on, say, nearby NATO ally Turkey in its ongoing battles with Syrian Kurds. All at a time when the comparative purchasing power of America's Israeli aid has plummeted.

"The Israel of 2023," Siegel and Leibovitz observed, "is immeasurably wealthier and more powerful than the dusty socialist country of 40 years ago, where local electrical grids could be overloaded by American hair dryers." Boy howdy is it.

Israel now has a highergross domestic product (GDP) per capita than Japan and Italy, and is closing in fast on France and the United Kingdom. In 1981, as the hawkish former Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams pointed out in Commentary last year, "the United States provided Israel with $4.5 billion in economic and military aid at a time when the entire GDP of the Jewish state was only $25.4 billion." Now? GDP is north of $500 billion.

Annual U.S. aid has gone from 17.7 percent of the Israeli economy to 0.7 percent; even with the big new cash infusion, that figure goes up this fiscal year to just 5.7 percent. And as Biden himself crassly observed when selling the supplemental, the strings attached include "send[ing] military equipment from our own stockpiles, then us[ing] the money authorized by Congress to replenish those stockpiles—by buying from American suppliers….[We're] help[ing] our friends while helping ourselves." So America is sending money that Israel no longer needs to lock in long-term contracts for the military-industrial complex. (The 10-year, $38-billion Memorandum of Understanding signed by President Barack Obama in 2018 allowed for Israel to spend about a quarter of the annual total on its own domestic defense production until this year, after which the percentage is to be ratcheted steadily down to zero.)

This close military partnership, which has been the basic bilateral setup since not long after the 1967 Six Day War, has produced benefits for both Washington and Jerusalem. Israel gets some of the world's most advanced defense tech, such as the Iron Dome and David's Sling missile-interception systems; the U.S. gets premium intelligence in a volatile region and a privileged seat at the table for making commerce-lubricating peace deals.

But it's also true those contracts could be freely entered into, without a cent of U.S. taxpayer money, just as both Sanders and anti-interventionist Republicans like Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah) would prefer. What would happen to American influence then?

"Weaning Israel off of American assistance would have the added advantage of removing the issue of conditioning such aid or using it as leverage, ideas that sometimes surface when the United States and Israel differ on important policy issues, such as the peace process," former Israeli Justice Minister Yossi Beilin and former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Egypt Daniel Kurtzer wrote four years ago in The National Interest.

In other words, say goodbye to Schumer's—and Biden's—serially insisted-upon "two-state solution," which has been a political non-starter in Israel especially since October 7. And don't be surprised if the country's regional Qualitative Military Edge, enshrined in U.S. law, would be deployed more freely in preemptively striking Iran's offensive capabilities, whether in missile production, nuclear development, or senior-level military planning.

So would cutting aid to Israel actually lead to more, not less war? Making predictions in the Middle East is a fool's errand. But one way to think through the scenario planning, and move faster toward a world where foreign policy commitments are more commensurate with the domestic public opinion of the countries involved, is to remember a factor that too often escapes attention: Israel is hardly the only country along the Arabian Peninsula to receive billions in American military aid.

What Leverage Bought

If the U.S. permanently cut off all aid tomorrow—and even if the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the infamous "Israel lobby," were suddenly to close up shop—the bonds of affection between the two countries would still remain strong. According to a Gallup poll, Israel has for the past quarter-century been among the leading countries toward which Americans have the most favorable opinion. Eighty-five percent of the world's Jewish population lives either in the U.S. or in Israel, in roughly equal numbers (the numerical capital of Jewry is not Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, but New York City). There are some 200,000 dual citizens living in Israel; at least 33 were killed by Hamas on or after October 7, and five more were still believed to be held hostage as of May 1. Even as Americans—particularly Democrats, and the young—have soured on Israel's prosecution of the war, there remains between the countries a shared liberal democratic (and capitalistic) culture and decades' worth of human intercourse.

Now consider Saudi Arabia.

The country that has purchased more U.S. military equipment than any other—at $140 billion and counting—has been unpopular with the American public for the entire 21st century, and not only because it was home to most of the September 11 hijackers. The House of Saud's dictatorial monarchy routinely ranks near the bottom of global freedom indices, women only recently were granted the right to drive a car, and the regime infamously assassinated Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. Saudi Arabia has been a prime mover in the brutal, decade-long Yemeni civil war, a conflict that the United Nations estimates has led to nearly 400,000 deaths, most of them civilian.

Yet in the absence of any American sympathies at all, Riyadh has still been a key strategic partner with Washington for going on eight decades. Why? Oil production is certainly part of it, though Russia and Venezuela also have tons of the stuff. The truth is that the kingdom has been deft enough diplomatically, and flush enough with spendable petrodollars, to keep insinuating itself into whatever preoccupations the American empire has at the moment: the Cold War, the Gulf War, the Iraq War, containing Iran, and doing the often messy work of behind-the-scenes negotiations on military logistics, CIA skulduggery, and peace deals.

It is in that latter category that the Saudis find themselves yet again the object of not-quite-requitable American desire, this time in the form of a tantalizing peace pact with Israel, one that could potentially dwarf in practical and symbolic significance the historic 2020 Abraham Accords between the Jewish state and Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates. The Saudi asking price thus far? Just a military security guarantee, the likes of which America has only with Japan, South Korea, and the members of NATO.

Such are the realities of American leverage in the Middle East. Washington now includes among its major non-NATO allies Qatar (circa 2022, in exchange for help with U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan), Tunisia (2015, for its role in the Arab Spring), Morocco and Kuwait (2003, for assistance in the war on terror), Bahrain (2002, ditto), and more than a dozen other countries, including Israel and Egypt.

When states are both relatively poor and militarily insecure, as Israel was in the 1970s and Egypt remains to this day, the lure of access to the world's dominant military can persuade otherwise reluctant leaders to do things they and/or their populations would rather not. Like siting U.S. military bases, or taking the American side in a regional conflict—or recognizing Israel's right to exist.

Israel since its 1948 inception has been the single largest recipient of U.S. aid, at north of $300 billion in constant 2024 dollars. Clocking in at No. 2, with more than $150 billion, is Egypt. This American money bought the modern Middle East's most foundational peace treaty. That 1979 deal, brokered by President Jimmy Carter, not only formally ended the longtime antagonists' various wars; it marked the first time an Arab country formally accepted Israel's existence. For that move against the preponderance of his country's public opinion, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat paid two years later with his life.

Such are the inherent and ongoing tensions of bribing authoritarians to make unpopular deals, particularly in countries predisposed toward resenting Israelis and/or Americans. The basing of non-Muslim U.S. troops near Saudi Arabia's holy Islamic sites of Mecca and Medina was the original radicalizing complaint of Osama bin Laden. The Jordanian population, long encouraged to treat neighboring Israel as the enemy, was ill-prepared to accept King Hussein's 1994 signing of mutual recognition, nudged in part by President Bill Clinton's promise to forgive $700 million of the country's debt. A 2022 poll of the Hashemite kingdom by the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies found opposition to diplomatic recognition at a staggering 94 percent.

That number would almost certainly be lower if the Jordanian monarchy didn't choose to stoke anti-Israeli sentiment in public while cooperating privately to such a degree that the country shot down several Iranian missiles before they could even cross into Israeli airspace. King Abdullah II called for three noisy days of national mourning last October over the deadly explosion outside of Gaza's Al-Shifa Hospital even after Israel's involvement and the initial death toll had both been convincingly debunked. Queen Rania that same month told CNN that the world "silence" in the face of Israel's war was "deafening," and that "to many in our region, it makes the Western world complicit." The kingdom tamps down criticism of the normalization deal (which it still publicly defends) and prevents protesters from ransacking the Israeli embassy but otherwise keeps the rhetoric ratcheted.

A poor country with rampant unemployment, Jordan is a top-10 recipient of U.S. aid, and it relies heavily on Israel for trade and resource cooperation. Caught literally between Iran and Israel, home to a large and restive Palestinian population, beset by months of anti-Israel protests, the monarchy is increasingly fragile and constantly triangulating. If the U.S. were to suddenly pull the rug out from underneath Jordanian aid, some 6 percent of the country's GDP would go poof.

It is easy to look upon such realities as an excuse to keep perpetuating the American foreign policy status quo. If leverage in the authoritarian Arab neighborhood has bought peace deals with Israel, the reopening of the Suez Canal, and the forging of an anti-Iran axis in the Persian Gulf, why threaten to unravel these projects by beating a hasty retreat?

That question implies a far-too-rosy picture of the status quo, and it ignores the extent to which American public opinion deviates from the conventional wisdom in Washington.

Imperial Autopilot

The American-led world order, with its emphases on international cooperation, tariff reduction, and mutual military treaties, arose out of the ashes of World War II as a bulwark against communism. That comprehensible project, while the source of semi-constant controversy in implementation, was broadly popular in the United States; it was articulated regularly by every president from Harry Truman to George H.W. Bush. With the end of the Cold War, and the failure to secure an explicit postwar settlement, came the end of domestic support for America's starring global role.

What happens when institutions wheeze on long after their rationales have collapsed? Elite corruption and populist revolt.

Corruption doesn't necessarily have to mean self-enrichment, though surely the people near the top of the American foreign policy pyramid rarely have to scrounge up their next meal. It's more about the temptations of using America's unmatched power. In the immortal 1993 words of the United States' then-ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine Albright, spoken to the more restraint-oriented Colin Powell, "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?" Albright's interventionist point of view ended up winning the battle for Clinton's foreign policy, and then Powell became the chief salesman for President George W. Bush's disastrous war of choice in Iraq.

Afghanistan was America's longest and least popular war, yet imperial autopilot, along with the fallacy of sunken costs, meant that it took more than two decades until Biden finally (and messily) ended it. NATO, and Washington's preeminence within it, is still the dominant military paradigm on the decidedly non-American continent of Europe, even with the open skepticism about the alliance expressed serially by the former and possibly future president Donald Trump.

America has already retreated under both Trump and Biden from its legacy role in reducing global tariffs, embracing instead the kind of made-in-America mercantilism that generations of their predecessors had mostly resisted. Wherever there is some 75-year-old, Washington-forged institution and commitments thereof, there is active domestic politics railing against it.

Washington's leading role in the Middle East is somewhat younger, at around a half-century, but similarly archaic. We no longer need to counter the Soviet Union, no longer depend on foreign oil, and no longer cling to the messianic delusion that liberal democracy in the region can be spread at the point of a gun. If you could somehow wipe the slate clean and craft a new U.S. approach to the Middle East that would better align with public opinion, what would that look like?

Almost certainly, the vast majority of foreign aid to this and other regions would vanish overnight. Nos. 3 through 10 on the 2022 aid-recipient list—Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Egypt, Jordan, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan—would be cut off. But Nos. 1 and 2 might well remain.

The Intolerability of October 6

The Republicans who unsuccessfully opposed the $95 billion aid package to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan were onto something, as have been such presidential candidates as Pat Buchanan, 1992 Clinton, and 2000 George W. Bush. Americans are generally weary of throwing billions abroad at problems that should be solved by someone else, particularly when there are unresolved problems galore at home.

But specifically, Americans favor helping with the defense of Ukraine (No. 1 on the 2022 aid recipient list), Israel (No. 2), and Taiwan. In the absence of a coherent and comprehensible strategy, one that reflects the more modest ambitions of voters, foreign policy remains subject to the temporal emotions and legacy attachments of the public. Jordan probably wouldn't win an up-or-down referendum on U.S. support; Israel almost certainly would. Both, however, could benefit from being cut off.

The Israeli case for independence is largely about latitude, but not only: Having to spend $3.8 billion a year rather than receive it means making some responsible choices about budget priorities. Authoritarian Arab governments, too, need to take, rather than continue to shirk, responsibility.

The horrors of October 7 revealed that the seemingly operable status quo of October 6 was in fact untenable. It was, and is, untenable for Israel to live next to neighbors, to the north and southwest, who regularly fire rockets into the country and sporadically dig tunnels to execute acts of terrorism. It's untenable for Gaza's residents to live under the dictatorial whims of a theocratic death cult that takes money from foreign governments not to build prosperity but to harass and murder Israelis. It's untenable for the region's autocrats to loudly pin the blame for their own heavy-handed misgovernance on American and Israeli scapegoats while quietly reaching out for assistance from Washington and Tel Aviv.

Qatar enjoys the status of being a major non-NATO ally with the U.S. while also financing and sheltering the leadership of Hamas. That too is untenable, and the designation should be withdrawn. Residents of the Palestinian West Bank live in a harassed and conflict-ridden uncertainty and emasculation, with second-class property rights and lousy government services. Untenable. Iran flexes its muscle to turn parts of Israel's neighbors into vassal states rather than fully fledged independent entities. None of this is tenable.

Meanwhile, the U.S. floats above the whole region, handing out aid and military contracts like a grand seigneur, hoping on Mondays to build peace, on Tuesdays to launch airstrikes, and on Wednesday try to tamp down the resulting messes from spreading into a regional war. It does deals with some of the most hideous regimes on earth while the captive populations seethe.

It is axiomatic, yet catastrophically underappreciated in Washington: Those with the most power will inevitably behave corruptly, and those without responsibility will inevitably behave irresponsibly. An Israel less tethered may feel less constrained, sure, but it may also find itself more isolated on the world stage, and therefore a tad more cautious. Arab leaders without the American security blanket may find themselves having to speak blunt truths to their populations, including about the true sources of their comparative lack of prosperity and freedom. And a United States less compromised by getting its thumbs in every pie will potentially have more, not less, moral standing in the world.

So cut off Israel. And Egypt, and Jordan, and Saudi Arabia as well. Let them bear the responsibility of their own actions, and the costs of their own security. It's time to consciously manage America's imperial drawdown, rather than careen between fading Atlanticism and resurgent populism. What's the point of having this superb military? To defend America.

The post What If the U.S. Cuts Off Aid to Israel? appeared first on Reason.com.

Nikki Haley shows her true colors: The former presidential contender, United Nations ambassador, and South Carolina governor visited Israel this week. A photo was taken of her writing "finish them" on artillery shells that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) will use in either Lebanon or Gaza, along with "America [heart emoji] Israel always." (She was visiting the north, so using the artillery shells against Hezbollah seems more likely.)

Finish them!

זה מה שכתבה היום חברתי, השגרירה לשעבר, ניקי היילי על פגז במהלך ביקור במוצב של תותחנים בגבול הצפון.

הגיע הזמן לשינוי משוואה - תושבי צור וצידון יתפנו, תושבי הצפון יחזרו.

צה"ל יכול לנצח! pic.twitter.com/qvLNCXPl7o

— Danny Danon ???????? דני דנון (@dannydanon) May 28, 2024

Interpreted charitably, Haley could have meant "them" as Hamas, the terrorists responsible for perpetrating the October 7 attack which killed 1,200 Israelis and took 240 hostages, or Hezbollah, a terrorist group and key Hamas ally based in Lebanon that's been assaulting the north. But given how much criticism Israel has received from international onlookers—including the International Criminal Court, whose prosecutor issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant—for purported war crimes and conducting what has been described as a "genocide" in Gaza, "finish them" seems liable to misinterpretation. Her follow-up comments didn't exactly exonerate her.

"Israel, they're the good guys," Haley said in an interview with the newspaper Israel Hayom (more coverage here). "And you know what I want Israelis to know? You're doing the right thing. Don't let anybody make you feel wrong."

Haley then criticized the Biden administration's decision earlier this month to pause heavy bombs shipments to Israel over the military's Rafah invasion: "You can't hold back weapons from an ally. So if we want to be a friend to Israel, the best thing America can do is let Israel do its job and just support we shouldn't be preaching to Israel, we shouldn't be telling them how to win the war, we shouldn't tell them what they can or can't do."

"We should just be saying, what else do you need?" Haley continued.

Biden's side of the story: "Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those [2,000-pound] bombs and other ways in which they go after population centers," President Joe Biden said on CNN. "I've made it clear to Bibi [Netanyahu] and the war cabinet: They're not going to get our support, if in fact they go on these population centers."

It's easy to look at Haley as nothing more than a war hawk and, indeed, her comments suggest that she wants the U.S. to provide fully unconditional support for Israel—contra how the Biden administration has been handling the situation. The "finish them" comment was probably referring to terrorists, not civilians—making it a bit less horrifying than some of the loudest voices would have you believe—but Haley's inability to describe the situation with sufficient nuance is disturbing nonetheless, and more evidence of why her 2024 presidential campaign so sorely missed the mark.

Military assistance: The U.S. provides Israel with $3.8 billion in military aid each year. This year, legislators here have already passed a supplemental $26 billion in funds for Israeli defense and humanitarian aid in Gaza. At least 25,000 Gazans have been killed so far, though there are disputes over the death toll (controversy explained here), with some 10,000 believed to be buried in the rubble that covers the Strip. U.S. taxpayer dollars are going toward Israel's attempt to wipe out Hamas, which includes a lot of horror and destruction, in the form of both civilian lives and an almost completely wiped-out Gaza Strip that will be hard for residents to inhabit if they're ever able to return. Roads, hospitals, schools, mosques, and all the buildings needed to support the functions of daily life have been obliterated over the last six months; it's not clear when the bombing will cease or what will be left when it does.

Hamas, of course, is partially responsible for foisting this amount of destruction on the people they tyrannize (some of whom voted them into power years ago): They hide among civilians, whether it's putting entrances to their tunnel network on sacrosanct hospital grounds or storing weapons next to MRI machines. Some of the destruction is also a function of the dense geography of the Gaza Strip. But some of it is also surely due to Israeli military failures and a poorly calibrated sense of what is just: A recent strike near a displaced persons camp which took out two valuable Hamas members also killed 45 innocents via a fire that the airstrike accidentally started. (The bombs responsible were GBU-39s, designed and manufactured in the U.S.)

When the act of finishing Hamas involves so much collateral damage—in the form of civilian life especially—it's fair to expect politicians not to treat the war in Gaza like a sporting match, or to decorate bombs with hearts.

Scenes from New York: Policing discourse following the death, at the hands of cops, of 26-year-old Brooklyn resident Andre Mayfield, who was wielding two knives and appeared to be having a mental episode.

Dispatch whomever you want. Cops would love to not be part of this. The problem here is 1) the armed man approached the cops. And 2) there are no workers who can or should approach a man holding a knife in each hand to "make clinical decisions and deliver care." https://t.co/KF3iOYIIyt

— Peter Moskos (@PeterMoskos) May 30, 2024

QUICK HITS

• Update on FlagGate: "My wife is fond of flying flags," Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito wrote in a letter to legislators who asked that he recuse himself from cases related to the January 6 insurrection. "I am not. She was solely responsible for having flagpoles put up at our residence and our vacation home and has flown a wide variety of flags over the years." At issue is the fact that detractors claim that the flags were linked to stolen-election theories.
• Who is actually behind Elon Musk's business empire?
• A court in Hong Kong just convicted 14 pro-democracy activists using the Beijing-imposed national security law.
• Incredible immigration policy:

https://t.co/sOZGoy0klC pic.twitter.com/PDI2SyFVhs

— ????burga????burganonics????burgaology????burgamatics???? (@C_hoffmanni) May 28, 2024

The post War Hawk Autographs Bombs appeared first on Reason.com.

Britain's signals intelligence spy chief raised eyebrows this week with warnings that Russia is coordinating both cyberattacks and physical acts of sabotage against the West. There's evidence to back her claims—and the West may be returning the favor. Coming soon after FBI Director Christopher Wray warned that China is targeting American infrastructure, it looks like the world is not only fracturing once again, but that the hostile blocs are engaged in covert warfare.

Rumors of War

"We are increasingly concerned about growing links between the Russian intelligence services and proxy groups to conduct cyberattacks as well as suspected physical surveillance and sabotage operations," Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) Director Anne Keast-Butler told an audience at the United Kingdom government-sponsored CyberUK 2024 conference. "Before, Russia simply created the right environments for these groups to operate, but now they are nurturing and inspiring these non-state cyber actors in some cases seemingly coordinating physical attacks against the West."

Keast-Butler, whose agency is comparable to the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), also called out China, Iran, and North Korea as cybersecurity dangers. But naming Russian officials as being behind "physical attacks" raises the stakes. Sadly, her claims are well-founded.

Sabotage, Espionage, and Other Mischief

"A 20-year-old British man has been charged with masterminding an arson plot against a Ukrainian-linked target in London for the benefit of the Russian state," CBS News reported last month. That wasn't an isolated incident.

"In April alone a clutch of alleged pro-Russian saboteurs were detained across the continent," The Economist noted May 12 in describing what it called a "shadow war" between East and West. "Germany arrested two German-Russian dual nationals on suspicion of plotting attacks on American military facilities and other targets on behalf of the GRU, Russia's military intelligence agency. Poland arrested a man who was preparing to pass the GRU information on Rzeszow airport, the most important hub for military aid to Ukraine. Britain charged several men over an earlier arson attack in March on a Ukrainian-owned logistics firm in London whose Spanish depot was also targeted."

The GCHQ chief's warnings coupled with reality on the ground are alarming in themselves. Worse, they come after FBI Director Christopher Wray issued similar cautions in April about China.

"The PRC [People's Republic of China] has made it clear that it considers every sector that makes our society run as fair game in its bid to dominate on the world stage, and that its plan is to land low blows against civilian infrastructure to try to induce panic and break America's will to resist," Wray told the Vanderbilt Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats in Nashville, Tennessee.

Wray clarified that, by "infrastructure," he meant "everything from water treatment facilities and energy grids to transportation and information technology."

If that doesn't make you want to check that your pantry is stocked and that the water filter and generator are in working order, nothing will.

A Game Both Sides Can Play

Of course, in war of any sort, the implication is that both sides are involved in conflict. Western intelligence officials are loud in their warnings about foreign threats, but less open regarding just what their own operatives might be doing in Russia, China, and elsewhere. Still, there's evidence that this is hardly a one-sided war, shadowy though it may be.

In June 2022, The New York Times reported that Ukraine's defensive efforts relied heavily on "a stealthy network of commandos and spies rushing to provide weapons, intelligence and training." In addition to Americans, the story noted, "commandos from other NATO countries, including Britain, France, Canada and Lithuania, also have been working inside Ukraine."

American journalist and combat veteran Jack Murphy goes further, claiming the CIA, working through an allied spy service "is responsible for many of the unexplained explosions and other mishaps that have befallen the Russian military industrial complex." The targets include "railway bridges, fuel depots and power plants," he adds.

And if you wonder who blew up Nord Stream 1 and 2, well, so do a lot of people. Russia was initially accused, but it didn't make a lot of sense for the country's forces to destroy pipelines that generated revenue and fed western dependence on Russian natural gas. Since then, Denmark and Sweden have closed inconclusive investigations, journalist Seymour Hersh blamed American officials, and a report by Der Spiegel and The Washington Post placed responsibility on a rogue Ukrainian military officer.

The Wider War Is Here

Taken all together, the warnings from Keast-Butler and Wray, as well as acts of sabotage and arrests of foreign agents suggest that fears of a wider war resulting from Russia's continuing invasion of Ukraine may miss the point; the war could already be here. People looking for tanks and troops are overlooking cyber intrusions, arson, bombings, and other low-level mayhem.

"Russia is definitely at war with the West," Oleksandr Danylyuk of the Royal United Services Institute, a British defense and security think tank, told NBC News earlier this week.

Russian officials seem to embrace that understanding, with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov commenting in March that the invasion of Ukraine, originally referred to by the euphemism "special military operation," is now more serious. "It has become a war for us as the collective West more and more directly increases its level of involvement in the conflict," he said.

Fortunately, a shadow war of the sort around us is less destructive than open military conflict, especially when the hostilities involve nuclear-armed powers. It's far better that spies hack the email accounts of government officials, as happened in the case of a Russian cyberattack on Germany's ruling Social Democrats, than that cities burn. But civilians still must live with the consequences of combatants attempting to do each other harm—particularly when the harm is to infrastructure on which regular people rely.

So, welcome to the world of global shadow war. Try to not become collateral damage.

The post World War War III May Already Have Started—in the Shadows appeared first on Reason.com.

On April 13, Iran launched an unprecedented retaliatory drone and missile attack on Israel, leading the U.S. and its allies to reach once again for their favorite weapon of war—sanctions.

This knee-jerk reaction was as predictable as it was ill-founded, according to the scholarly research. In Nicholas Mulder's 2022 treatise The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War, he traces the history of sanctions from the blockades in World War I to today's morass of economic sanctions. Mulder concludes that "the historical record is relatively clear: most economic sanctions have not worked."

Mulder's treatise was followed by the book Backfire: How Sanctions Reshape the World Against U.S. Interests by Agathe Demarais. Drawing on her experience as an economic policy adviser for the diplomatic corps of the French Treasury, Demarais observes that sanctions tend to unite rather than isolate countries that are at odds with the U.S. and its allies, thereby transforming the geopolitical landscape and global economy to the detriment of U.S. influence.

The case of Iran is particularly illustrative of these points. In the recent How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare, authors Vali Nasr, Narges Bajoghli, Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, and Ali Vaez present a detailed study on the long-term impacts of economic sanctions on Iran. Nasr is an Iranian-born distinguished professor of international affairs and Middle East studies, a veteran diplomat, and a member of the U.S. State Department's Foreign Affairs Policy Board. He and his collaborators studied the economic data and conducted long-form oral history interviews with 80 residents of Iran. The authors demonstrate that decades of Western sanctions, including the Trump administration's "maximum pressure" campaign of 2018, have neither modified Iran's international behavior in ways intended by policy makers nor precipitated any semblance of regime change.

Instead, sanctions have inflicted severe hardships on ordinary Iranians. The middle class has shrunk significantly from 45 percent in 2017 to 30 percent in 2020. If that wasn't bad enough, Nasr and his colleagues estimate that the death toll attributable to the humanitarian catastrophes triggered by sanctions—such as food shortages and the breakdown of critical medical systems—has amounted to "hundreds of thousands."

By imposing sanctions, the U.S. sought to crush Iran's economy and make life so difficult for ordinary Iranians that they would rise up and either change the regime's behavior or overthrow it altogether. However, this strategy relied on the assumption that Iranians would blame their misery on their own government and not those imposing the sanctions. Rather than blaming their government, Iranians have experienced a classic rally-'round-the-flag effect with sanctions inadvertently solidifying support for the regime. By creating animus against the U.S., sanctions have turned Iran's hurting middle class into either de facto or de jure supporters of Iran's leaders.

This is reflected in the interviews conducted by Nasr and his colleagues. Hamid, an interviewee and a disaster management specialist in Iran's civil society sector, said of sanctions: "All they've done is make the Revolutionary Guard more powerful. Those of us in civil society are suffocating."

Reza, a disillusioned university professor, echoed Hamid's concerns: "If it's not the nuclear issue, it's our ballistic missiles. If it's not our ballistic missiles, it'll be human rights. If it's not human rights, [the U.S.] will find another reason [to sanction Iran]."

Furthermore, Nasr and his co-authors contend that sanctions have driven the Iranian government to adopt more defensive and aggressive postures—the very behaviors that spurred the U.S. to impose sanctions on Iran in the first place. This pattern of behavior, where a sanctioned state becomes more militaristic and risk-taking, is well-documented and aligns with what economic theory predicts about actors with "nothing to lose." This was highlighted by William L. Silber in The Power of Nothing to Lose: The Hail Mary Effect in Politics, War, and Business, in which he elucidates how extreme pressure during times of "war" can lead nations to take bold, often reckless actions.

It's clear that the sanctions landscape is littered with failure—not just in Iran but also in Syria, Venezuela, North Korea, Cuba, and, most recently, Russia. Despite their dismal track record, a 2021 Treasury Department report showed that the use of sanctions had surged by a stunning 900 percent since 2000. The persistence in using this tool highlights a disconnect between expected and actual outcomes in U.S. foreign policy strategy.

If the U.S. and its allies had aimed to create a more moderate Iran or change the regime with sanctions, they have failed. What is needed is a more nuanced and effective foreign policy that rests on diplomacy and does not inadvertently strengthen the very behaviors and regimes the U.S. aims to modify.

The post Sanctions Are for Losers appeared first on Reason.com.

Israel attacks Iran: Overnight, Israeli forces attacked near Isfahan, Iran, in retribution for Iran's barrage of drones and missiles that hit Israel roughly a week ago.

This round of fighting was started by an April 1 Israeli strike in Syria that struck an Iranian consulate complex and killed three senior commanders and four officers reportedly responsible for dictating Iran's military strategy. But Iran and Israel have been engaged in a shadow war for a long time; recent strikes just bring tensions out into the open.

Iranian air defense systems reportedly intercepted most of the drones. Some flights over Iran's airspace were diverted, while others were canceled. Damage was minimal.

Isfahan is where several of Iran's nuclear sites are located, as well as its uranium enrichment program that's necessary for developing nuclear capabilities. Some of the strikes seemed designed to hit a major military base in the area; but just as Iran's attack barely harmed Israel, the same seems to be true here.

Within Israel, opinion was split. Some engaged in saber-rattling, while others said the attack looked "weak."

"Iran must understand that when it acts against us, we have the ability to strike at any time, and we can do serious damage," said Eyal Hulata, a former national security adviser, on Galei Tzahal (Army Radio). "We have a highly capable air force, and the United States is on our side."

Iranian officials, too, have signaled mixed views. Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi had warned that "the tiniest act of aggression" on his nation's soil would provoke a massive response, and that "nothing would remain from the Zionist regime." But many noted that Iran's attack on Israel—as well as the ample warning given—seemed like it wasn't designed to do much damage. In other words: Both nations have escalated, yes, but also shown some restraint and warranted trepidation, despite posturing to the contrary.

Biden's sticky situation: "Democratic donors covered more than $1 million in legal fees racked up by attorneys representing President Joe Biden in a yearlong special counsel probe into his handling of classified documents," reports the Associated Press. "The use of party funds to cover Biden's legal bills is not without precedent and falls within the bounds of campaign finance law, but it could cloud Biden's ability to continue to hammer former President Donald Trump over his far more extensive use of donor funds to cover his legal bills."

Of course, it's unlikely that will actually happen because that would require an adversarial mainstream media that's interested in actually holding Biden accountable for his duplicitousness.

"Every single time you give to the campaign, we're going straight to talk to voters…we are not spending money on legal bills or hawking gold sneakers," said Rufus Gifford, Biden's campaign finance chair, on MSNBC earlier this month, in a soundbite he was surely proud of. It turns out that this is simply untrue!

Scenes from New York: "At New Jersey's Teterboro and Long Island's Islip airports, dozens of private jets destined for Florida take off at times such as 11:42 p.m. or 11:54 p.m. Over at JFK, a regular flight from San Juan, Puerto Rico, arrives at a seemingly purposeful time: about 15 minutes after midnight. Meanwhile, tax attorneys tell stories of clients idling in their luxury SUVs near the New Jersey entrance to the George Washington Bridge shortly before 12 a.m., waiting for the clock to turn before crossing the state line to New York."

Inside the wonderful world of rich people making sure their residence stories line up in case they're audited, courtesy of Bloomberg. Each and every one of these people? Heroes, in my book.

QUICK HITS

• The Appeal published a database of prison commissary prices. Some items available for purchase by prisoners are marked up by as much as 600 percent.
• Yesterday, 108 Columbia students were arrested after the school called in cops to attempt to empty a 50-tent encampment that had been set up, called the "Gaza Solidarity Encampment." Video footage here.
• Non-iPhone users are apparently being excluded from group chats. Don't worry, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) is coming to the rescue. Her plan? Break up Apple.
• Challenges with collecting data on religious service attendance over time, from Marginal Revolution.
• Interesting case study on the use of AI in documentaries:

If true, and looks like it is, this is a major ethical breach.

I say this as someone in favor of using effects, including AI, in documentaries.

Many documentary elements, like in all film, operate at a subconscious level for the viewer. These elements should generate an… https://t.co/DdsNlu6u19

— Zach Weissmueller (@TheAbridgedZach) April 19, 2024

The post Israel's Retaliation appeared first on Reason.com.

Is war with Iran coming? 

Last Saturday, Iran launched hundreds of armed drones and missiles to attack Israel in retaliation for an airstrike on an Iranian consulate in Syria that killed seven members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, including a general. Israel and the U.S. report that they intercepted most of the drones, and the sole known casualty was a 7-year-old girl critically injured by falling missile shrapnel. Israel has not retaliated…yet. 

In the wake of all that, today's guest had something to say about the way some American activists loudly defended the Islamic Republic of Iran after staying conspicuously silent during protests against the regime and crackdowns that began almost two years ago.

That was Elica Le Bon, a first-generation Iranian immigrant born in the U.K. and currently living in Los Angeles, where she practices law and runs several large social media accounts that bring attention to the plight of the Iranian people. On the latest episode of Just Asking Questions, she talked to Reason's Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe about the Iranian attack, the state of the protest movement and how social media has affected it, and her recent televised exchange with Dave Smith. 

Watch the full conversation on Reason's YouTube channel or the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.

Sources referenced in this conversation:

1. Amnesty International: Iran executes 853 people in eight-year high amid relentless repression and renewed 'war on drugs'
2. Mahsa Amini | Flickr
3.  Iran Population 2024 (Live)
4.  Dancing Iranian taxi driver becomes unlikely anti-regime hero
5. Iranian advanced nuclear centrifuges: https://isis-online.org/uploads/isis-reports/documents/Analysis_of_February_2024_IAEA_Iran_Verification_Report_March_4_2024_Final.pdf

• Producer: John Osterhoudt

The post Elica Le Bon: Is War with Iran Coming? appeared first on Reason.com.

President Joe Biden came into office promising to get American troops out of "forever wars." Tonight, in his State of the Union address, he offered a vision of indefinite U.S. involvement in conflicts around the world.

In April 2021, speaking about the war in Afghanistan, the president railed against those who believe that "withdrawal would damage America's credibility and weaken America's influence in the world. I believe the exact opposite is true." Tonight, Biden attacked skeptics who "want us to walk away from our leadership in the world."

He began his speech with a plea for more U.S. military aid to Ukraine, arguing that "the free world is at risk, emboldening others who would do us harm to do what they wish." Later, Biden announced sweeping plans for U.S. involvement in Gaza.

While the U.S. military will build a new port in Gaza to deliver food to Palestinians—and, the president promised, "no U.S. boots will be on the ground"—the Biden administration will continue to arm the Israeli military campaign that Biden said "has taken a greater toll on innocent civilians than all previous wars in Gaza combined." 

The Biden administration has transferred weapons to Israel at the American taxpayer's expense, and is providing targeting intelligence to the Israeli military. "Creating stability in the Middle East also means containing the threat posed by Iran," Biden added, touting his airstrikes on Yemen.

That air campaign has thrown a wrench into Yemen's peace talks—which, ironically, the Biden administration brokered a couple years before.

Biden positioned himself as a peace dove during the 2020 presidential debates, and one of his first major decisions in office was to go through with a long-planned U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. "It's time to end the forever war," the president announced in an April 2021 speech, rejecting an "approach where U.S. exit is tied to conditions on the ground."

"We have to have clear answers to the following questions: Just what conditions require to—be required to allow us to depart?" he asked in that speech. "By what means and how long would it take to achieve them, if they could be achieved at all? And at what additional cost in lives and treasure?"

Today, Biden answered those questions: The wars will continue for the foreseeable future.

The post Biden Touts More Forever Wars, Breaking His 2021 Promises appeared first on Reason.com.

President Joe Biden announced Friday that the U.S. military will work with Jordan to begin airdropping aid to starving Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Ever since it was proposed, this idea has attracted criticisms from experienced humanitarian workers, who say the airdrops are an expensive, wasteful gimmick to avoid addressing the political problems causing the starvation.

The charity Oxfam America, for example, issued a statement Thursday arguing that airdrops "would mostly serve to relieve the guilty consciences of senior U.S. officials whose policies are contributing to the ongoing atrocities and risk of famine in Gaza." Instead, it said, Biden should "cut the flow" of American weapons to Israel.

Jeremy Konyndyk, the president of Refugees International and a former disaster relief official in the Obama and Biden administrations, outlined the problems with airdrops in a PBS interview a day before Biden's announcement.

"We only used them when we had absolutely no other option, because they're the worst way to get aid in. They cost a lot of money, they're difficult to mount logistically, and they get very little volume," Konyndyk said. "We're only resorting to airdrops because of the blockages by the Israeli government."

Airdropping food costs about $16,000 per ton, as opposed to $180 per ton on average to move food aid by truck, according to a U.S. Air Force study from 2016.

Under pressure from the Biden administration, the Israeli government has opened a land crossing into the Gaza Strip—but Israeli nationalist protesters have physically blocked the crossing several times. Meanwhile, goods entering Gaza from Egypt must still go through the arduous Israeli border inspection process.

Sen. Chris van Hollen (D–Md.), who visited the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing in January, told The New Yorker that some shipments were being held at the border for 20 days, and that he saw entire shipments turned back because they contained just one banned item, such as a tent with a metal pole.

The U.S. government itself has admitted that the starvation is a political problem, although it blames Hamas rather than Israel.

"It is not a question of aid going in," U.S. State Department spokesman Matt Miller told reporters on Thursday. "There is a distribution problem inside Gaza right now because there are police officers—some of whom are members of Hamas—who have been providing the security for that distribution inside Gaza. And what Israel says is that they have a legitimate right to go after Hamas. We would obviously prefer to see members of a security force inside Gaza who are not Hamas members."

Inside the Gaza Strip, distribution has been chaotic. Riots have broken out around aid convoys, and Hamas-affiliated police shot a teenager in a December incident. Israeli forces have also bombed the police officers guarding aid convoys. U.S. official David Satterfield said last month that the attacks on police in Gaza have made it "virtually impossible" to protect aid from "criminal gangs."

The deadliest aid-related incident of the war, known as "flour massacre," took place Wednesday, when Israeli forces opened fire on a crowd of Palestinians seeking aid. According to the Palestinian health ministry, 112 people were killed. The Israeli military claims that its troops opened fire when Palestinians approached them in an unsafe way, that their gunfire caused only 10 casualties, and that most of the deaths were produced by a stampede.

That day, the war's Palestinian death toll reportedly crossed 30,000 deaths. Half a million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, a quarter of the population, are facing imminent starvation, according to U.N. officials.

In addition to announcing the airdrops, Biden said that he was seeking an "immediate" six-week ceasefire and a "surge" of aid on the ground. He has so far resisted calling for a permanent end to the war. When the war resumes, the aid that cost Americans so much to fly in may soon be bombed by American weapons.

The post Airdropping Aid to Gaza Is an Expensive Gimmick appeared first on Reason.com.

Iranians went to the polls on Friday—or didn't—for the first time since a women-led uprising against religious rule rocked the nation. Authorities reported a record-low turnout of 27 percent, even after they extended voting for an additional two hours, amidst widespread disillusionment and calls for an election boycott.

The country had suffered months of unrest following the death of Mahsa Amini, who was arrested for not complying with the country's mandatory hijab rule in September 2022. Although the streets have calmed down, it was the most significant challenge to the Islamic Republic yet.

The Iranian government was clearly hoping that the parliamentary elections would be an opportunity to show that Iranians had renewed their trust in the system. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei recently argued that voting was an act of resistance against the Islamic Republic's enemies. Banners in public places stated that "strong turnout = strong Iran."

Instead, the election became an opportunity for Iranians to show that they were still fed up with the system. Jailed women's rights activist Narges Mohammadi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year, called on Iranians to avoid the "sham elections" in order to show the "illegitimacy of the Islamic Republic."

Even many figures from within the Iranian system declared their intent to boycott. A group of 300 political figures, including former members of parliament, signed a petition stating that they would not participate in an "engineered" vote.

The news site Khabaronline cited a poll in the run-up to the election projecting a 36 percent turnout. Authorities ordered the article deleted. The final turnout number turned out to be ten percent lower than the offending poll.

Since the 1979 revolution, Iran has had a mix of democratic and theocratic institutions. Election turnout has rarely fallen below 50 percent and has sometimes reached as high as 70 percent. Iranian "leaders crave constantly high turnout as evidence of the people's love of the revolution, but…loathe the results that high turnout always brings," in the words of political scientist Shervin Malekzadeh.

Over the past few years, the government has dropped the pretense of caring. During protests in November 2019, authorities launched a crackdown that killed hundreds of people, then banned thousands of candidates from the February 2020 parliamentary election. A record low 42 percent of voters turned out that year, a result that the Iranian government blamed on coronavirus and "negative propaganda."

Even Hassan Rouhani, who was President of Iran during the November 2019 crackdown, has been banned from running for office. He joins a long list of elected Iranian leaders who have outlived their usefulness to the system, including former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was in office during the 2009 protest wave and crackdown.

Ahmadinejad and Rouhani have both refashioned themselves as dissidents.

"Something should have been done to make these elections more competitive. Instead, they limited people's opportunity to participate," Rouhani said in an August 2023 interview. "Those who are in favor of minority rule over the majority should know that they are threatening the future of the system and the revolution. It's not so easy to call this system an Islamic republic anymore."

The post Record Low Turnout in Iran as Voters Lose Faith in Elections appeared first on Reason.com.

Reporter and podcaster Eli Lake and author Jeremy Hammond debated the resolution, "The root cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the Palestinians' rejection of Israel's right to exist."

Taking the affirmative is Lake, the former senior national security correspondent for The Daily Beast and Newsweek. He is currently a reporter at The Free Press and host of The Re-Education podcast. He has also contributed to CNN, Fox News, C-SPAN, Charlie Rose, the I Am Rapaport: Stereo Podcast, and Bloggingheads.tv.

Hammond, an independent journalist and author, takes the negative. He is the author of several books, including Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.

• Video and Audio Editing: John Osterhoudt

The post What's the Root Cause of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict? appeared first on Reason.com.

A new candidate is making waves in the Democratic primaries: nobody. Organizers had urged Democrats to vote "uncommitted" in the Michigan primary on Tuesday, a way to show President Joe Biden that his foreign policy risked losing a crucial swing state. Around 13 percent of Democratic primary voters did, exceeding organizers' expectations.

The campaign was led by Arab Americans angry with U.S. military involvement in Gaza and Yemen. Other voters were motivated by a lesser-known side of Biden's foreign policy: The Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) also campaigned for uncommitted votes in order to protest Biden's support for Armenia's enemy Azerbaijan.

"We didn't deliver the bulk of those votes, clearly, but we were part of it, and we were happy to be a part of it," says Aram Hamparian, executive director of ANCA. Armenians are looking to organize similar campaigns in Nevada and Pennsylvania, two other swing states with robust diaspora communities, according to Hamparian.

The U.S. Census counts 17,000 Armenian Americans in Michigan, although it may be an undercount, as the Armenian Community Center in Dearborn says that there are 50,000 Armenian Americans in the state. Both the Armenian and Arab communities in the state date back more than a century.

The Armenian uncommitted campaign went public on February 20, when ANCA board member Dzovinar Hatsakordzian published an op-ed in The Armenian Weekly announcing that she would vote "uncommitted" in the Michigan primary.

"I was surprised with the reaction of the community," Hatsakordzian tells Reason. "When we started, we didn't think that they would be open to the idea, but [the support] was overwhelming."

Armenian Americans "tend to align along with the area they live in" in terms of party politics, but "they'll cross a party line if they feel like there's a very stark issue before them," Hamparian says. "The military aid to Azerbaijan is our chief complaint about Biden."

In September 2023, the Azerbaijani military stormed the Armenian-majority territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, driving out almost the entire population, an act that many outside observers have called ethnic cleansing or even genocide. It was the ugly coda to a long, brutal conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

During the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh had attempted to declare their independence from Azerbaijan, leading to a war that involved atrocities and mass displacement on both sides. (The territory is also called Artsakh in Armenian.) The conflict froze in the mid-1990s and restarted with an Azerbaijani offensive in September 2020.

"If they do not leave our lands of their own free will, we will chase them away like dogs and we are doing that," Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev said in an October 2020 speech. Aliyev also stated that he would welcome Nagorno-Karabakh's Armenians as fellow citizens, a claim that Armenians were inclined to disbelieve after Azerbaijani troops beheaded two elderly Armenian men on camera.

Azerbaijan's wars have been funded, in part, by the American taxpayer. Congress initially tried to stay out of the conflict, banning military aid to Azerbaijan in 1992. A decade later, the U.S. government reversed course, hoping to gain a new strategic ally, because Azerbaijan is located between Iran and Russia and along key air routes to Afghanistan.

Every president since George W. Bush has waived the congressional aid restrictions, and Washington provided $164 million in "security assistance" to the Azerbaijani military between 2002 and 2020. Most of that aid, over $100 million, came during Donald Trump's presidency.

After the 2020 offensive, then-candidate Biden demanded an end to the aid. But after he took office, Biden continued to sign off on the security assistance programs.

"The bulk of military aid to Azerbaijan went under Trump, and the [2020 offensive] took place in the last months of Trump's presidency, so he bears heavy responsibility for that," Hamparian says, but "having witnessed the war, [Biden] continued the military aid."

There was a particularly strong sense of whiplash within the Armenian-American community in April 2021. That month, Biden recognized the World War I–era mass murder of Armenians in Turkey as a genocide, a move that Armenian Americans have long called for. A few days later, Biden went back on his campaign promise and approved additional aid to Azerbaijan.

The Biden administration announced its genocide recognition with massive media fanfare, while it quietly notified Congress about the military aid. Biden was behaving "as if somehow Armenians will not notice that he's arming a genocidal state in the same week that he's recognizing a genocidal crime," Hamparian says.

U.S. military aid, which mostly focuses on border security, is not a make-or-break issue for the Azerbaijani army. Between 2010 and 2020, the majority of Azerbaijan's weapons came from Russia, with smaller contributions from Israel, Belarus, and Turkey. Russia also supplied nearly all of Armenia's weapons in the same period.

In addition to selling weapons to both sides, Russia has had peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh since November 2020. Those troops have largely not acted to protect the local population.

However small U.S. aid was in the grand scheme of things, Hamparian believes that the very existence of that aid was "morally emboldening" to Azerbaijani leaders, who thought they had an American green light.

Then came the starvation siege. In late 2022 and early 2023, the Azerbaijani army gradually cut off Nagorno-Karabakh's access to the outside world. Severe shortages set in. Azerbaijan was even rumored to be building a concentration camp for Armenian men, a rumor that New Lines journalists were able to corroborate using satellite imagery.

Her voice filled with emotion, Hatsakordzian describes the Armenian-American message to the Biden administration at the time: "We went to them, and we said we know this is going to end with ethnic cleansing…Why is my taxpayer money going to fund a genocidal country such as Azerbaijan?"

Those fears came true in September 2023, when the Azerbaijani army overran the territory, leading to a mass Armenian exodus. The Biden administration then paused military aid to Azerbaijan, and the Senate moved to make it a two-year suspension. At the time, Hamparian called Washington's actions "a day late and a dollar short."

Hatsakordzian says that she does not currently plan to vote for Biden, and that in order to win back her vote, "he can sanction Azerbaijan, he can stop sending weapons to Azerbaijan, and take concrete actions to stop the genocide that is going on."

Some Armenian Americans also sympathize with Arab Americans' campaign against the Biden administration.

The two campaigns "share the exact same frustrations" with U.S. foreign policy, says Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Democracy in the Arab World Now, a Washington-based nonprofit. She is an Armenian American whose own family escaped to Jerusalem in the wake of the Armenian genocide, before fleeing again due to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Whitson compares Armenian-American grievances with U.S. support for Azerbaijan to Palestinian-American grievances with U.S. support for Israel: "You have a strong diaspora community that's deeply opposed to an abusive regime, and they find their own government supporting it."

ANCA has been more circumspect about its stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Hatsakordzian and Hamparian emphasize that Armenians have good relations with their Arab and Jewish neighbors alike. Yet Hamparian supports, on principle, the other efforts to pressure the Biden administration in the primaries.

"Everyone who voted 'uncommitted' went to the polls trying to bring accountability to our foreign policy system, and that's a good thing," Hamparian says. "Exercises like this remind [politicians] that foreign policy doesn't start and end at the State Department. It's the property of the American people."

The post The Armenian-Azerbaijani Conflict Comes to Michigan appeared first on Reason.com.

In this week's The Reason Roundtable, Katherine Mangu-Ward is in the driver's seat, alongside Nick Gillespie and special guests Zach Weissmueller and Eric Boehm. The editors react to the latest plot twists in Donald Trump's various legal proceedings and the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

00:41—The trials of Donald Trump in Georgia and New York

25:04—Weekly Listener Question

33:23—Sora, a new AI video tool

43:55—The death of Alexei Navalny

49:58—This week's cultural recommendations

Mentioned in this podcast:

"How a New York Judge Arrived at a Staggering 'Disgorgement' Order Against Trump," by Jacob Sullum

"Prosecutor Fani Willis Touts the Value of Cash, but What About the Rest of Us?" by J.D. Tuccille

"Trump Ordered To Pay $364 Million for Inflating His Assets in Civil Fraud Trial," by Joe Lancaster

"Alvin Bragg Is Trying To Punish Trump for Something That Is Not a Crime," by Jacob Sullum

"Alexei Navalny's Death Is a Timely Reminder of How Much Russia Sucks," by Eric Boehm

"Why Is Nike Stomping on Independent Creators?" by Kevin P. Alexander

"Bury My Sneakers at Wounded Knee," by Nick Gillespie

"Creation Myth: Does innovation require intellectual property rights?" by Douglas Clement

"A Private Libertarian City in Honduras," by Zach Weissmueller

"The Real Reasons Africa Is Poor—and Why It Matters," by Nick Gillespie

Bono's Ukraine Speech

"Justice or persecution? The Trump dilemma"

Send your questions to [email protected]. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.

Today's sponsor:

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Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.

Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve

• Producer: Hunt Beaty

The post Goodbye, Navalny appeared first on Reason.com.