By Jeffrey Blehar
Tuesday, June 24, 2025
I had to laugh and take a deep breath when, on Thursday,
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced that Donald Trump would decide “within two weeks”
whether to offer American military assistance to Israel in knocking out Iran’s
most difficult-to-reach nuclear facilities. It was a nervous laugh, mind you; I was quietly gulping air because
that was the moment when I suspected the planes were already flying.
That night, the New York Times wrote about Donald
Trump’s frequent use of that specific locution over the years —
always in the context of either keeping a counterparty off its feet or buying
time — and suggested that Trump might be on the verge of backing down or being
persuaded by the “restrainers” in his administration to tap the brakes on
Benjamin Netanyahu. (In fact, some of the more reliably overconfident fools in
the world of political commentary went
all in on this theory.)
It never made any sense to me; the inexorable logic of
the military situation dictated a strike, and sooner rather than later. After a
week’s worth of pounding from the Israel Defense Forces, the Iranian regime was
disoriented and defenseless, helplessly exposed to Israeli and American air
superiority, like a turtle flipped on its shell and baking underneath the
pitiless desert sun. Now was the time to finish the job, not two weeks from
now, after (what was left of) the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps command
structure had time to regroup.
So we finished the job. It was the right thing to do. In
fact, I will go further than that: If Donald Trump’s finest moment as a
politician is forever destined to be that dark
day when he arose bleeding from an assassin’s bullet to throw a
reassuringly defiant fist to a terrified crowd, then there is good reason to
think that Saturday will ultimately rank second. Not because of any one image
or moment from the day’s events — although Trump’s charmingly direct invocation of the Creator at the end of his press
conference (“I just want to say, we love you, God,”) has immediately entered my
bedtime prayer rotation — but because of the foreign policy legacy it has the
potential to represent.
I operate by rather simple logic, myself. The Iranian
regime — whose unofficial motto is “Death to America,” and which openly calls
for the destruction of Israel, our sole true ally in the region — seeks a
nuclear weapon to achieve this goal. I have yet to see anyone other than Ben
Rhodes, or those quietly receiving funding from Qatar, argue that Iran should
be allowed to acquire or build one. That point having been settled, the
question then turns to what cost would be worth paying in order to prevent such
a thing from happening.
If the price is merely a few bombs from a B-2, then the
question is easily answered. Iran’s nuclear program has either been destroyed
permanently or set back decades. The mullahs are very upset, as one imagines
murderous religious fanatics tend to be, but also seemingly powerless to do
much more than cause a temporary economic ruction by laying mines across the
Strait of Hormuz. (Note: In a late-breaking development after this piece had
gone to press, Trump announced last night that he had in fact brokered a cease-fire between Iran and Israel.)
This is an unalloyed victory for the forces of sanity and
civilization. To those who point to the inevitability of unforeseen “blowback,”
I will remind you that Iran and its proxies have been engaging in low-level
conflict with America for well over a decade now — who do you think was funding
and training the people killing our boys in Iraq and Afghanistan all those
years? — and now it is free to try its hand at more of the same, if it wishes,
this time without a looming nuclear threat to back it up. America has
come out ahead on this in concrete, measurable, and hugely valuable
geostrategic ways.
Most importantly of all, none of this would have
happened if Kamala Harris were president. Think about that for a moment;
think about the road not taken. One can only speculate about hypotheticals, but
. . . c’mon now. Look into your heart, you know it to be true. Imagine a
President Harris, sitting uneasily atop a Democratic coalition barely held
together at the seams: Would she have encouraged Netanyahu in his initial
campaign against Iranian military and nuclear assets? Would she have provided
the final air support and ordnance necessary to get the job done? With people
such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, David Hogg, and Zohran Mamdani calling the
shots among large segments of her base?
To ask the question out loud is to answer it: no. For
that reason alone, it is no exaggeration to say that the shape of the world
perceptibly turned for the better on the outcome of last November’s election.
You can draw a straight line between Donald Trump’s winning the 2024 race and
Iran’s nuclear weapons program now being best described as a series of variably
sized craters. If you supported Donald Trump and voted for him in 2024, you
should feel proud of it today: Saturday is the most obvious evidence yet of why
your vote mattered. (And if you voted for Donald Trump because you mistakenly
thought him to be a whimpering, limp-tailed isolationist? Well, your dismay pleases me as well.)
As a writer concerned primarily with domestic matters —
the sorts of actors who keep the Carnival of Fools freshly stocked on a weekly
basis — I’m disinclined to break character for a sober foreign policy
discussion. (I instead recommend Noah Rothman, who assesses the damage done here, as well as Mark Wright, who breaks down potential
Iranian responses here.) The purpose of this column has always been
different: to grimly celebrate the human spectacle of modern politics.
But I’m proud to be an American today, and happy to give
credit to Donald Trump for genuinely living up to his self-billing as the
Indispensable Man in this case. I haven’t gotten to the point of spontaneously
composing a new patriotic anthem yet, mind you, but for once I feel
sanguine about developments in the Middle East — and that’s a sentence people
like me rarely have the chance to write.
Was There Ever Really a TikTok Ban at All?
And now to harsh your good vibes, I will point out that
Donald Trump is still quite literally an openly lawless president. Last
Tuesday, with little public fanfare or media commentary, he announced that once again he was not executing on the terms
of the TikTok bill passed into law and signed by President Biden. (Recall that
the bill requires TikTok’s Chinese ownership to either divest itself of control
over the company or face a blanket platform ban in U.S. markets.) Trump has
instead decided to invent a “90-day extension” and return to the issue in
September. Thus, America’s increasingly alienated teens tap away unmolested —
for now.
There is nothing left to debate on this issue. The policy arguments for shuttering TikTok absent a Chinese
sale, whether you agree with them or not, were fully litigated in the court of
public opinion and the halls of Congress over two years ago. A bill was passed by both chambers — a
Republican House and a Democratic Senate, no less — and signed by President
Biden as the most notable bipartisan achievement of his term in office. The
plain language of that bill permitted the president one, and only one, 90-day
extension before forcing his hand — a clause, mind you, that was written in
precise anticipation of a truculent president refusing to enforce a law that
would make him unpopular with TikTok-using Americans.
Trump has flouted the law regardless — boldly, knowingly,
and well aware that those who object have zero plausible recourse. Perhaps we
use the chaos of the times as an excuse to look away from what many, no doubt,
regard as a “minor” infraction against the U.S. Constitution. And that in
itself is a sad comment. In a world that threatens to catch fire at any moment
— in a nation riven domestically by demonstrations, riots, and inexplicable political assassinations — it probably feels
difficult to summon much outrage over Trump’s lawless refusal to enforce an
American national security law he once campaigned in favor of. But it is
appalling, nonetheless.
Maybe you are uninterested in TikTok as an issue. Trump’s
act — and the complete lack of any political consequences — should alarm you
deeply regardless, for it could just as easily pertain to your interests next.
The sighingly bland resignation with which so many are treating Trump’s refusal
to execute the TikTok ban is a sad testament to how quickly we, as a nation,
have accommodated ourselves to the casual Caesarism of our era.
Notorious Sex Pest Endorses Notorious Sex Pest
On Sunday, former President Bill Clinton endorsed former Governor Andrew Cuomo in today’s primary
election for the Democratic nomination in New York City’s mayoral race. These
two men clearly understand one another well, for all manner of reasons — none
of which Andrew Cuomo is eager to remind voters of at the end of a surly,
disengaged campaign that he has taken far too much for granted. That’s why you’re only hearing
about it now, at the last second — in what perhaps betrays a last-second lack
of confidence in the outcome — long after it is too late to do him either good
or ill.
No comments:
Post a Comment