The Logical Effect of Undermining Our Allies’ Trust

By Mike Nelson

Wednesday, July 22, 2026

 

Before entering office and in the year and a half since, officials comprising the second Trump administration’s defense and foreign policy establishment have been sending a clear message to our NATO allies in Europe: The United States is no longer putting as much of an emphasis on the alliance nor on the defense of the European continent. This message has been sent directly and indirectly.

 

Individuals appointed to key Pentagon positions have for years advocated for a diminished American presence in Europe. Vice President J.D. Vance—both in statements intended for public consumption and those revealed to the public through the administration’s incompetence—has characterized Europeans as freeloaders whose security is no longer a primary American interest. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered a reduction in Army forces present in Germany and Poland and—on the anniversary of D-Day, of all times—chose to demean, berate, and scold our European partners about their domestic politics. And Elbridge Colby, the undersecretary of defense for policy, has intervened to halt approved aid to Ukraine, denied support for Ukrainian deep strikes using U.S.-supplied munitions, and recently championed “NATO 3.0,” wherein reduced U.S. support for the alliance would be explicit.

 

Perhaps most concerning to the allies, however, are the messages from the man leading the administration. President Trump, who has for years harangued our European partners for not providing enough for the common defense—about which he was correct—seemed to believe these countries were in arrears in membership dues that the United States was covering and, therefore, that the United States deserved repayment—about which he is incorrect. The historical under-contribution by European allies was rather a failure to meet promised spending goals on their own militaries as a percentage of GDP.

 

This historical deficit is being, or in most cases already has been, corrected. The historical goal of 2 percent of GDP spent on defense, codified in 2014 at the NATO Wales summit, has since been reached by all member states. The allies have further expanded this goal to 5 percent of GDP, to be reached by 2035, with Poland currently leading the way with 4.48 percent of its GDP spent on defense in 2025. (The U.S., meanwhile, is actually spending a lower percentage of its GDP on defense now than it did in 2014.)

 

The president deserves a large share of the credit for this shift. The world’s liberal democracies had grown comfortable and complacent, like the eponymous character at the beginning of Rocky III, while the tyrannical, authoritarian, and malign regimes (the Clubber Langs of the world, if you will) grew stronger and more prepared.

 

Ironically, the president must share some of the credit with Russian President Vladimir Putin—a man for whom the prospect of diminishing NATO is a primary motivation. Europe's rearmament has come about largely in response to Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, as did the expansion of the alliance to include two previously nonaligned powers: Finland and Sweden.

 

But President Trump has continued to suggest that the United States—the most powerful of NATO’s member nations—might not support its fellow members if they were attacked. Trump has even suggested that the United States might be the country doing the attacking. The Danes took his threats against Greenland so seriously that they deployed their special operations forces to the territory in preparation for an American offensive.

 

The message is clear, through both the Trump administration’s words and actions: Europe should not count on the United States. The nation that had once been the stalwart ally might, in the near future, be a neutral observer at best or an adversary at worst. Even if the Trump administration does not progress further down this path, the idea that America may be fickle about commitments in which we had previously been resolute is not a concern that can be ignored. Europe now has to consider the possibility that the indispensable nation may choose to be dispensable in the future of European security.

 

It shouldn’t come as a surprise then that defense officials in capitals throughout Europe may start planning and implementing the steps necessary for a post-American Europe; not as a preference, but as a matter of necessity.

 

Europe is expanding its defense industrial base, and NATO countries are weighing a shift away from traditional arrangements of purchasing American-made or designed equipment. Canada, after witnessing America shutting off certain targeting capabilities in the GMLRS missile guidance systems provided to Ukraine, is considering building its future air force footprint around the Gripen fighter instead of the F-35, not because the Gripen is superior, but because it is not reliant on the continued approval of a mercurial American government to perform after purchase. German arms manufacturer Rheinmetall and Sweden’s Saab, maker of the Gripen, are expanding in preparation to fill European demand created by a reduction in orders for American weapons and, ironically, by the increased spending the president demanded.

 

It is realistic and rhetorically clear that if the United States keeps banging on the table demanding that Europe become less dependent on us, the result would be for it to become more independent from us. The result of the Trump administration pushing Europe to the side is Europeans adapting to that reality. Yet Colby seemed perturbed at the effect for which his policy was the cause when he posted a condemnation of Europe’s plans on X last week, saying that a “‘middle powers’ strategy”—the idea that second-tier powers would align independently and in prevention of aggression by the great powers—is not “a serious possibility.” In a demonstration of the underlying problem, Colby condemns Europeans who consider procuring weapons elsewhere, but then reminds them that “access to the American DIB (defense industrial base) is a privilege, not a right.” How dare you consider looking elsewhere for weapons, but also remember we might cut off your access to them, fail to fulfill already paid-for orders, deny software integration that makes the weapons usable, or deny you access to repair parts. Gee, who would want to build a hedge against that unreliable supply chain?

 

Colby seems to want inelastic European demand for a product for which we are specifically threatening to cut off supply. It’s an extension of the larger issues at play between the administration and NATO allies over Iran. The administration doesn’t feel the need to share its plans with or get input from European allies, but begins clutching its pearls when those allies don’t jump to join our rudderless conflict.

 

In other words, the administration seems to want Europe to provide more for their interests, but as we determine their interests to be. It’s an overcorrection. Rather than building on the legitimate win of reviving NATO defense spending and capabilities, this rhetoric is creating cracks that can spread into full fractures in the alliance. Colby is correct that developing a middle powers strategy is not the best option for Europe; but neither is America receding from its role as the leader of the free world. And the administration doesn’t seem to grasp that the former flows from the latter.

 

Without a strengthened transatlantic alliance, the world will become less advantageous for liberal democracies and more favorable for those rising powers looking to fill the empty space created by the gaps in the alliance. There are some who convince themselves America has no business maintaining interest in, or benefiting from the liberal world order and instead recommend a withdrawal to behind the walls of an American-dominated fortress of the Western Hemisphere. But history demonstrates that the storms that gather around the world eventually spread to those who seek refuge in isolationism.

For the DSA, ‘Working Class’ Is a State of Mind

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, July 21, 2026

 

For a movement that is obsessed with class distinctions and interclass conflict, the Democratic Socialists of America don’t seem to have an uncontested definition of what makes someone a member of the “working class.”

 

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani recently took a stab at it, though not to the satisfaction of his interlocutor, the New York Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro:

 

 

Mamdani’s confusion is not his alone. He and his fellow Democratic Socialists are apt to craft definitions so expansive that they include well-compensated professionals — from programmers to doctors who are “making $400,000-plus,” according to New York City DSA co-chair Grace Mausser — only so that they can include themselves among the proletariat.

 

For those of us who can recognize Hasan Piker’s costumed reenactments of the Cultural Revolution for the teeth-shatteringly cringe-inducing spectacles they are, there’s a lot of humor in this. But there is a long Marxist tradition in which the well-heeled and overeducated assume a working-class identity so as to appropriate its assumed authenticity. Marx himself agonized over how to define class without casting himself and his fellow discontented wastrels as irredeemably bourgeois.

 

Where does the proletariat end and the managerial class begin? Does it end with what Marx called the “labor aristocracy” — wage earners, to be sure, but also trade unionists co-opted by and in league with the upper classes? Does it include the “lumpenproletariat,” whom Marx derided as criminals and degenerates that nevertheless make up a significant portion of the disaffected masses?

 

The most enduring Marxian definition settled on “a class of laborers who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital.” That could describe just about anyone who “sells” labor in the marketplace. And eventually it did. Marx and, later, Friedrich Engels identified a phenomenon in which even highly paid professionals can be “proletarianized.”

 

In the end, all that makes someone reliably a member of the “working class” in the Marxist conception of the word is the extent to which they experience “class struggle.” But the struggle they envision is only ever against the forces unleashed by capitalism, not those imposed on American workers by the imperious state.

 

As the DSA’s Gustavo Gordillo ill-advisedly admitted on national television, workers’ rights take a back seat to socialist power grabs. “If one publicly owned store is enough to put someone out of business,” Gordillo said of the struggling grocers with whom Mamdani’s state-owned outlets will now compete, “then maybe they shouldn’t have been in that business in the first place.”

 

Of course, the malleable definition of what constitutes the working class papers over this conflict. With this solipsistic device, the upstart bodega owner who operates on the thinnest of margins becomes an aristocratic elite, while his tormentors, who have only ever known the rarified redoubts of academia and advocacy, somehow cast themselves as the weather-beaten avatars of the great unwashed.

 

It’s a neat trick, but an old one. What’s most impressive about it is that it still works.

Socialists vs. the Senate

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, July 21, 2026

 

Political parties tend to harshly reject the idea that they are a threat to the constitutional order, but the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is making it part of its brand.

 

The DSA has released a new program that, besides contemplating the advent of a classless society, calls for abolishing the Senate, the presidency, and the Supreme Court.

 

This is literally a revolutionary program to topple the American system as we have known it since 1789.

 

It’s the kind of thing you might expect after angry rebels mount the barricades in Washington, D.C., and overthrow the government. It makes proposals to abolish the filibuster seem trifling in comparison and even Court-packing look relatively moderate.

 

The proposal to kill off the world’s greatest deliberative body has gotten the most attention. The DSA’s co-chair, Gustavo Gordillo, went on Fox  News to explain that the Senate is “undemocratic,” while Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has said that she opposes the filibuster and elements of the Senate that “were founded on Jim Crow.”

 

Contra Gordillo, the Senate is a democratic institution; no one wins a Senate seat without getting more votes than his or her opponent.

 

Yet part of its role in our system is to serve as a check on popular passions. At the institution’s inception, state legislatures appointed senators. Those days are long gone (the 17th Amendment, ratified in 1913, requires direct election), but six-year terms and staggered elections give the Senate more insulation from the transient currents of public sentiment than the House of Representatives.

 

Then, there are the Senate rules that put an emphasis on consensus and delay. AOC sounded confused when she cited Senate practices created under Jim Crow, the system of formalized racial discrimination that arose about 100 years after the creation of the Senate. It’s true that the filibuster was used as a tool to attempt to block landmark civil rights legislation, without ultimate success. But the filibuster is an instrument of every minority party in the Senate trying to block the agenda of a president of the opposing party, very much including Senate Democrats arrayed against President Trump today.

 

The Senate has another function, which is giving small states equal representation with large states. This is the source of the charge that it is undemocratic. Why should Wyoming, population roughly 600,000, have as many senators as California, population nearly 40 million? This is meant, though, to keep large states from having overwhelming influence on the nation’s governance and to give easy-to-ignore places a say in the nation’s affairs.

 

For proportional representation, there’s the House; California has 52 members of Congress, whereas Wyoming has one.

 

All this said, regardless of the merits, the Constitution deems the provision of equal senators for the states unamendable: “No State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.”

 

This suggests that the dissolution of the constitutional system couldn’t be achieved by constitutional means, since the Founders didn’t supply a readily available self-destruct button for their brilliant handiwork.

 

Not that the DSA cares. What it is seeking would, in some ways, be a return to the Articles of Confederation, under which we had a unicameral legislature and neither a presidency nor federal courts. But this made for a very weak central government, when the DSA wants an overweening Washington, D.C., shorn of the inherent checks on the popular will that come with a multi-layered federal system.

 

In short, it hopes for what Lord Hailsham, in his criticism of the British parliamentary system, famously called an “elective dictatorship.”

 

Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave a speech last week where he inveighed against left-wing extremists who seek to destroy rather than build, targeting “the physical embodied symbols of power and invention and achievement.” He might have added, with a nod to the DSA, the U.S. constitutional order. The socialists have met the enemy — and it is our own long-standing, highly successful governing institutions.

The Anti-Odyssey Crusade Has Lost the Plot

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Monday, July 20, 2026

 

Who would have thought that it could be so sinful to enjoy a cinematic epic? This weekend, Christopher Nolan’s latest blockbuster, The Odyssey, opened to a flurry of ticket sales, to a storm of acclamatory notices, and to the enmity of a bunch of rattled conservative “influencers” who seem to have had Odyssea delenda est tattooed in wine-dark ink across their foreheads. Merely to signal one’s intention to see the film has caused one to be chased around Twitter by a cadre of digital Furies, flouncing, denouncing, and renouncing as they go. Among the charges that they have thrown at would-be audience members is that they are “enemies of Western civilization.” Gosh!

 

This, suffice it to say, is Weird Behavior — and it is no less so because it comes from people who maintain that their ends are pure. There is nothing whatsoever wrong with criticizing a popular  movie, but, in its tone, its substance, and its aims, the present anti-Odyssey crusade no more constitutes “movie criticism” than last summer’s freakout over Sydney Sweeney’s denim commercial constituted “commercial criticism.” Criticism of art — which, naturally, is only possible after the critic has actually experienced that art — involves analysis, judgment, and thought. The suggestion that a person who attends a given film is, ipso facto, an accomplice to the destruction of the United States — or, in my particular case, ought to be “deported”! — reflects none of those things. Instead, it reflects  politics — and a stunted, aggressive, illiberal politics at that.

 

This weekend, I saw it argued in various places that those who claim to have enjoyed Nolan’s movie are, in fact, motivated by the desire to construct a “narrative,” or to change America’s immigration laws, or to reshape the Republican Party. This is a monomaniacal, totalitarian, Stasi-like non sequitur. It is projection, on an IMAX scale. It represents everything that I have always hated about the insistence that “everything is political” — an insistence that, for most of my life, has been the preserve of the idiopathic left but has recently started to derange the right as well. As a free person, living in a free country, I reserve the right to watch things, or listen to things, or eat things without being expected to don armor and go 18 rounds for the privilege. You didn’t like the movie? That’s great. I don’t like a lot of movies — including one of Christopher Nolan’s recent offerings that I am simply not intelligent enough to understand (Tenet). You are so upset that someone would go to the movie that you elect to send them emails telling them that they should be denaturalized? Well, now we have a problem. This is not East Germany.

 

Unlike with music, I do not have especially refined or useful thoughts about movies. But if I were to offer a criticism of Nolan’s production of The Odyssey, it would be that, for a Greek text that predated the New Testament, the treatment is altogether too Christian. Xenia — which is referred to exclusively as “Zeus’s law” in the film — is a real concept of that era. But the nature of the guilt that Odysseus feels about its violation, together with the implication that all the lives of Troy were individually valuable, is anachronistic. Add in that Odysseus’s resistance to the sirens is transmuted into an ersatz crucifixion scene, and that none of his infidelity is depicted or openly acknowledged, and one is left with a moral framework that, in some respects, would have been alien to the authors of the original text.

 

Still, one ought not to jump from there to the supposition that this is an attack on the Western canon. Odysseus’s in-film conviction that his deployment of the horse at Troy constituted an unforgivable violation of xenia was probably not intended by Homer. But it was what Dante thought. In the Inferno, Dante condemns Odysseus — appearing under his Latin name, Ulysses — not as the cunning hero of Greek epic but as a fraudulent counselor, and he explicitly cites the use of the Trojan Horse among the sins for which Ulysses is damned. In so doing, Dante is not attempting to recover Homer’s moral universe; he is deliberately reinterpreting it through the lens of medieval Christianity. Thus is Dante’s Odysseus judged not by the standards of Bronze Age Greece, but by those of 14th-century Catholic Europe. (In the 17th century, this same impulse led Milton to perform a similar feat in reverse, appropriating the Homeric and Virgilian epic tradition to tell the story of Genesis.) Seven hundred years later, Christopher Nolan has made the same move. If one’s sole concern is accuracy, one may dislike this, but one cannot in good faith propose that it serves as a repudiation of our culture.

 

But, of course, the loudest voices against The Odyssey — the people who have become so committed to the conclusion with which they began that they have talked themselves into the position that the only authentically socially conservative approach toward the  movie is to steal it — are not concerned about the adaptation’s accuracy. They are not upset that the story has been Christianized, any more than they were upset with Virgil for Romanizing it, or with Chaucer and Shakespeare for Englishing it, or with James Joyce for translating it into his interminable modern prose. Rather, they are upset with other things — transient, prosaic things — and they are hoping that they can fashion their censoriousness into a weapon fit for those battles. They cannot. Kick as they may, their attempts will have the same ultimate effect as those made by their peers on the other side of contemporary Wokery: If they are heard at all, they will be received without alacrity, roundly ignored, and then woven into contempt for the very  political agenda that their architects had hoped to advance.

 

Again, Dante shows the way home:

 

O ye who are in little bark, desirous

To listen, following after my own ship,

That singing voyaged on,

Turn back to see again your shores. . . .

 

 

Trump’s Canadian Tariffs Make No Sense

National Review Online

Wednesday, July 22, 2026

 

Donald Trump is compiling the most anti-Canadian record of any president since James Madison, who launched multiple invasions.

 

The White House has announced new 50 percent tariffs on a wide range of Canadian imports, “covering products ranging from wine to hockey sticks to cement,” a blow for American affordability as well as Canadian exporters. The new tariffs are set to take effect in 30 days.

 

The administration is claiming the authority to impose these latest tariffs under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, an act better known as Smoot–Hawley, a familiar name to students of the Great Depression. Section 338 itself had lain dormant for the better part of a century. It was considered on a few occasions in the 1930s and, again, in 1949 as something to be used against newly communist China. No tariffs were imposed in any of these cases. Regarded as an irrelevance in the age of postwar trade multilateralism, it was never repealed. The election of a “tariff man” in 2016 revived interest in this long-dormant section, which has now finally been reawakened. We are reminded once again, if only by default, of the value of sunset clauses.

 

Under Section 338, the president is authorized to impose tariffs of up to 50 percent on goods from a country on one of two conditions. The first is that that country has imposed “an unreasonable charge, exaction, regulation, or limitation” on any U.S. products without subjecting similar products from other countries to the same treatment. The second is when there is de facto discrimination in that country that “disadvantages” U.S. commerce as compared with that of any other foreign nation. As an example of the latter, the White House cites the way that, “beginning in March 2025, all Canadian provinces and territories halted the purchase, distribution, or retailing of U.S. alcoholic beverages.” Leaving aside the question whether the White House’s actions are in compliance with WTO rules or the provisions of NAFTA’s successor, the USMCA (questions that would take a long time to resolve), it seems to us that, on the facts, the president is within his legal rights to take the actions he has under Section 338 under domestic law, even if doing so is a mistake.

 

When it comes to negotiations, especially with historically friendly nations, adopting a tough stance is one thing; taking a belligerent one quite another. Suddenly announcing a 50 percent tariff hike on a wide range of items shortly after beginning the formal process that would terminate the USMCA in its current form in 2036 can be reasonably described as aggressive. The same can be said of the introduction of earlier tariffs on our northern neighbor, tariffs made no easier for Canadians to stomach by unnecessary, counterproductive, and insulting talk of their country as the “51st state.” Indeed, they triggered the Canadian retaliation against which the U.S. is now retaliating. That’s how escalation works.

 

We would add that in an era of rising geopolitical tensions, concern about supply lines, and worries about the Arctic, alienating Ottawa makes little sense. Mark Carney’s unwise diplomatic pivot toward Europe and China was something that he was probably always inclined to do, but the administration has now made it easier for him take this course.

 

So, what to do now? The logic behind NAFTA and the USMCA (the latter, it should be remembered, a treaty agreed during the president’s first term) was three-fold: economic efficiency (and thus greater prosperity), a reduction of the degree to which trade could act as an irritant between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico, and closer ties among North America’s three largest powers.

 

All those arguments still make sense to us, if not to the Trump administration. We hope, however, that the White House can see that trying to bludgeon its way to what it sees as a fairer trade relationship with Canada is hurting more than it helps. It should throw a few olive branches on the table as trade talks between the two sides continue.

 

More broadly, this episode only reinforces our conviction that, despite the best efforts of the Supreme Court, the current state of the law still gives the president too much latitude to turn tariffs into his playthings. That has to stop. A tariff is a tax. Taxation is, under the Constitution, a matter for Congress. When it comes to tariffs, Congress must do its constitutional duty, reverse the excessive delegation of its powers to the executive, and take back control.

The Robots Die So We Don’t

By Luther Ray Abel

Tuesday, July 21, 2026

 

Anduril Industries, arguably the Apple of this new generation of venture-capital-funded defense tech firms, just released its latest weapon system: Thunder. An autonomous attack rotorcraft — think an unmanned Falcon from Halo or the chick of a V-22 Osprey — Anduril’s Thunder is being sold as the multi-tool wingman for Apache attack helos and the forthcoming Cheyenne II from Bell (co-creator of the V-22). The added payload, load-out, and protective envelope that such slavecraft (in the engineering sense) could offer is enticing.

 

 

The concept of concentric defense is nothing new. Troy, Constantinople, even the humble hill fort, are all static examples. Layers of protection provide the soft innards multiple opportunities to retard an aggressor’s advance. The U.S. Navy puts this strategy to sea, with carrier strike groups composed of picket vessels — destroyers, cruisers, frigates, and subs — and aircraft providing a third dimension of surveillance and interdiction to ensure the continued operation of the carrier, the heart of the strike group. Should all weapons fail, we were informed that our ship, the USS Rodney M. Davis, would sail between the incoming threat (be it missiles, drones, or small-boat explosives) and sacrifice itself (ourselves) so that the carrier would survive. The same is expected of any vessel that orbits the floating nuclear airfield.

 

What Anduril aims to do is swap out the 200 souls aboard a frigate and replace them with swarms of sacrificial drones/chaff/missiles launched from autonomous motherships similar to the Thunder rotorcraft. Doing some napkin math, each sailor’s family would be due a minimum of $100,000 in the event of the ship’s loss. So $20 million and the public’s outrage at the very least but, more likely, something north of $250 million after all survivor benefits are factored. And that’s just for the loss of our most basic ship class with the smallest crew.

 

Whether Thunder will be successful, I can’t say. Anduril is a young, hungry company making products no government has commissioned. Yes, that’s right, they use VC funds to make products they think the military needs and only then sell them, which is an inversion of the procurement status quo since the 1990s. This has its advantages and disadvantages. Having developed this system with Archer Aviation for commercial or defense applications, Anduril may ultimately sell more for domestic rather than military use. I’d be interested to see what such a system could do for firefighting in California, for example.

 

I’ll be writing at length about Anduril and its peers in an upcoming magazine piece, but I’m not spoiling anything by admitting that their marketing chops are something else:

 

Mamdani Finally Admits He Can’t Arrest Bibi

By Jim Geraghty

Wednesday, July 22, 2026

 

Back in the early 1990s, Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan denounced Bill Clinton’s promises of welfare reform as “boob bait for bubbas.” (Ironically, welfare reform turned out to be one of Clinton’s greatest achievements as president.)

 

But the alliterative term stuck around, a useful moniker for the sort of dumb and unrealistic but popular promise that politicians are inclined to blurt out as they frenziedly pursue higher office.

 

In his mayoral campaign, Zohran Mamdani offered some grade-A “boob bait for bubbas” by promising to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he visited New York for the United Nations General Assembly.

 

If you are not addled by a frothing-at-the-mouth hostility to Israel and think about this for 30 seconds, you start to see the problems:

 

·         What charge would the city of New York bring against Netanyahu? Mamdani made a big deal out of the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant issued in November 2024, but the U.S. government does not recognize the authority of the ICC.

 

·         Not only does the U.S. government not recognize the authority of the ICC, the Trump administration has imposed sanctions on it. Secretary of State Marco Rubio pledged earlier this month, “using all the tools at our government’s disposal, working beside every ally with whom we can make common cause, we will dismantle the ICC — brick by brick, if necessary.”

 

·         Not only does the New York City government not have the authority to enforce an ICC arrest warrant, doing so would violate federal law. The American Servicemembers’ Protection Act states, “No agency or entity of any state or local government, including any court, may cooperate with the International Criminal Court.” No mayor has the authority to overrule federal law.

 

·         Criminal prosecution in a jurisdiction generally requires a connection to that jurisdiction, such as criminal conduct occurring within the state, a harmful result occurring there, or an offense intended to affect the state. Even if you buy into the allegations in the ICC arrest warrant, there is no tie to New York City or the United States.

 

·         While traveling to or from the United Nations for the annual general assembly or any other reason, Netanyahu would be immune from arrest, as covered by the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations, adopted by the U.N. General Assembly on February 13, 1946. That convention grants representatives of member states immunity from personal arrest or detention while exercising their functions and traveling to and from the place of meeting.

 

·         The Agreement between the United Nations and the United States of America Regarding the Headquarters of the United Nations, signed in 1947, declares that federal, state, and local authorities generally may not obstruct representatives of member nations traveling to or from the headquarters district.

 

·         Netanyahu travels with an extensive, well-trained, and experienced personal security detail, managed by the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security and counterintelligence agency. In past visits to New York City, Netanyahu has had 20 agents protecting him when he goes to the bathroom; he was described then as “the most protected man in the world.” The Shin Bet is exceptionally good at its job, and the NYPD is exceptionally good at theirs as well, and neither one is interested in getting into a confrontation or shootout with the other.

 

I was going to throw in the additional point that there is a widespread view among international law experts that “heads of state and heads of government are, and have long been, entitled to an absolute personal immunity from foreign jurisdiction.” With that said, Nicolás Maduro, Juan Orlando Hernández, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milošević, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and Manuel Noriega could not be reached for comment.

 

For a multitude of reasons, the notion of New York City police arresting Netanyahu was absurd from the start. But a whole lot of progressive activists in the city utterly loathe Netanyahu, and their little hearts went pitter-patter at the thought of the Israeli leader sitting inside a jail cell.

 

Last night, in a short video statement, Mamdani acknowledged that he has no authority, and never had any authority, to carry out his campaign promise.

 

“My administration has reviewed every avenue available under applicable law to determine whether New York City could execute the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant if Benjamin Netanyahu came here,” Mamdani said. “It is clear that we do not have the independent legal authority to enforce this warrant.”

 

No Shinola, Sherlock.

 

Nothing changed between last fall and now; the only difference is that the U.N. General Assembly is in two months, and Netanyahu intends to be there. (The Israeli leader may feel that he must attend the UNGA this year, to prove the point that no one has the authority to arrest him on U.S. soil.)

 

In the end, Mamdani is like the kid who runs for middle-school student council promising to replace the school lunches with McDonalds and Chick-fil-A and ban homework. He either didn’t know, or more likely, didn’t care that he didn’t have the authority to keep this promise; he just wanted the applause and to look like a tough guy.

 

Mamdani added, “The federal government, however, does [have the authority] — and I call on them to join the ICC and execute this warrant.”

 

No, the U.S. government does not have the authority to execute that warrant, at least not without repealing the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act and recognizing the authority of the ICC, which would give the ICC the authority to indict and arrest U.S. government officials and members of the military.

 

In 2020, the ICC ruled its prosecutor could investigate American citizens who worked in Afghanistan, claiming “a reasonable basis to believe that members of United States of America armed forces and members of the Central Intelligence Agency committed acts of torture, cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity, rape and sexual violence against conflict-related detainees in Afghanistan and other locations, principally in the 2003-2004 period.”

 

The Trump administration told the ICC to go pound sand. In September 2021 — after Joe Biden took office — the ICC’s chief prosecutor announced he had “decided to focus my office’s investigations in Afghanistan on crimes allegedly committed by the Taliban and the Islamic State — Khorasan Province (“IS-K”) and to deprioritize other aspects of this investigation.” Groups like the ACLU were “deeply disappointed” that an international court that had never been recognized as legitimate by the U.S. government was dropping its investigation into American citizens.

 

Rubio warned earlier this month that under the ICC’s perception of its own powers, “U.S. soldiers, police officers, Border Patrol agents and elected leaders could be dragged before an international court, tried by judges from random countries across the globe, found guilty under international laws we neither consent to nor control, and then imprisoned thousands of miles from America.”

 

Mamdani concluded, “I want to be equally clear: Benjamin Netanyahu is not welcome in New York City, nor is any other war criminal at large.” This means nothing. Mamdani can declare that the San Antonio Spurs are not welcome in New York City, and they’re still going to show up at Madison Square Garden for the game.

 

It will be interesting to see if any progressive gives Mamdani any grief for making an unrealistic promise, and once elected, admitting he never had the ability to keep it. My guess is those complaints will be few and far between. The “bubbas” don’t really care that much if the “boob bait” is real or not, they just like the thrill of hearing the promise, and can easily shrug off it being broken. That’s one of the traits that makes them “bubbas.” They’re happier being lied to than dealing with reality as it is.

 

Yearning for your political opponents to get arrested is a broad, bipartisan passion in America, from former ambassador Joe Wilson wanting to see Karl Rove “frog marched in handcuffs,” to the Republican chants of “lock her up” during the 2016 presidential campaign against Hillary Clinton, to Kamala Harris and other Democrats saying that Donald Trump should be sentenced to prison for his alleged crimes.

 

And occasionally, an elected official does get caught committing crimes and heads off to prison. Former New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez is currently residing in a minimum security federal prison in Allenwood, Pa., serving an eleven-year sentence for bribery, acting as a foreign agent, and obstruction of justice offenses.

 

The DSA Is Not Sending Its Best

 

New Jersey Democratic Representative Josh Gottheimer, Monday: “I’m glad to see other Democrats reiterating what I’ve been saying all along: the DSA are not Democrats. They’re socialists, who want to hijack the Democratic Party. The Democrats have a big tent. That’s our strength. We embrace a range of ideas — but there’s no room for anti-American bomb-throwers who oppose our ideas, values, & leaders.”

 

Democratic Representative Summer Lee, of Pennsylvania, a former member of the Democratic Socialists of America, responded: “What about Dems who sign bombs and vote to drop them?”

 

Except . . . Representative Josh Gottheimer has never signed a bomb. Lee is thinking of Pennsylvania’s Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro.

 

Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar jumped in, adding, “He signed the bombs you voted to be dropped. Hope this helps!”

 

Except . . . Omar is thinking of Shapiro’s visit to the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant in 2024 alongside Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, where he signed an artillery shell that would be shipped to the Ukrainian armed forces, not the Israeli ones. (And for what it’s worth, Omar voted for Ukraine military aid, just like Gottheimer did.)

 

I’m sorry, but the members of Congress who speak on behalf of the DSA are antisemitic morons. All Jewish guys named Josh look alike to them, and they can’t remember whether the guy they’re thinking of was signing bombs used by Ukraine or Israel, but it doesn’t really matter because they believe every Jewish officeholder is a warmonger anyway. They’re an absolute embarrassment, a disgrace to the already low standards of the U.S. House of Representatives, and a Democratic Party that had an ounce of self-respect would ask themselves why they put up with such shameful bargain-basement-bin imbecilic dolts to represent safe blue districts.

 

ADDENDUM: Over in the Washington Post, I point out that “Qatar Force One” — the plane that President Trump accepted from the Qatari government — was not, as promised, 100 percent up to the mission and when the U.S. Air Force declared, “No risk was taken in security, safety or mission communications,” that was not accurate. It turns out the new plane doesn’t have the advanced antimissile capabilities of the old model, which is why the president used one of the older planes to fly back from Turkey earlier this month.

 

“Even if you could have closed your eyes to the ethical problems, you had to wonder how secure a plane from Qatar was. (You know who used to work in the Qatari Water Department? Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11.) If you doubt that accepting an unsolicited large-scale gift can lead to bigger problems, check out that new movie about how accepting a big wooden horse worked out for ancient Troy.”