THE CONTINUED CASE FOR STRATEGIC PATIENCE.

After thirteen days of air strikes on and from Iran, both major combatants have paused, again, perhaps to talk.  "Airstrikes have paused and talks are pressing forward. But can the US and Iran take the off-ramp?"

RIP THE BANDAR OFF.

You'd expect to find Iran hawks such as Kevin McCullough writing for Town Hall.

The easiest decision any president can make is the one he never has to make.

Hold another meeting. Send another envoy. Extend another deadline. Issue another carefully worded statement expressing “grave concern.” Washington has turned delay into a governing philosophy, and nowhere has that habit been more dangerous than with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Forty-seven years after the ayatollahs seized power, we’re still hearing the same promise: Just give diplomacy a little more time.

President Donald Trump appears to have answered that question. Reports indicate he has approved plans to strike Iran’s deeply buried Pickaxe Mountain nuclear facility should Tehran continue refusing to abandon its march toward a nuclear weapon.

Process, nuance, failure.  Now that the World Cup has wrapped up and the teams and spectators are heading home, perhaps it is time to open up a can on the mullahs.

THE ILLOGIC OF MERCANTILISM.

Yesterday, Our President floated the idea of collecting payment for escort services.  I'm referring to the Arabian Gulf, get your mind out of the gutter.  National Review's Andrew McCarthy promptly and correctly flagged that proposal as illegal.

The strait was open when Trump decided to start the war. This was to the great advantage of the United States, a trading colossus with the world’s most formidable economy. If Trump were to impose tolls, fees, taxes, or whatever he deigns to call them — i.e., if he were to do exactly what Iran has been trying to do — that would induce other nations to extort payments for transit through international waters and straits of importance to international trade where they are in a position to intimidate shippers. Free trade would break down, which would be a catastrophe for nations heavily engaged in international trade, such as our own.

Congress should authorize the use of military force to keep the strait open. Still, regardless of whether one thinks the president has authority to use force to remedy a problem he created (because, however we got to this point, it is in America’s vital interest to keep the strait open), he has no authority to toll the strait, as he proposes to do.

It is entirely possible that Congress should enact legislation and/or that a binding international treaty should be forged that would reimburse the U.S. for security costs. I doubt that; I’d estimate that the benefits that the U.S. receives from free transit across the world far outweigh the costs of discouraging Iran from tolling the Hormuz Strait. But wherever you come out on that equation, a president has no authority to dictate transit taxes, and trying to do so is a provocation both constitutionally and in international relations.

I'll leave it to people who pay more attention to international affairs to evaluate whether that strait was open out of parties mutually looking the other way, the mullahs at infidels buying their oil, and the customers at the mullahs developing nuclear weapons.

WILL THE THING FINALLY BE PRESSED?

The useful idiots at Common Dreams are doing what useful idiots do.  "Iran Condemns Fresh US Bombing Campaign as ‘Serious Threat to International Peace’."  Pure projection, but isn't it the way of the abuser to accuse everybody else of being abusive?

The Iranian Foreign Ministry on Sunday condemned the United States’ latest round of airstrikes as a “flagrant violation” of international law that threatens to permanently derail efforts to achieve a peaceful resolution to the war, which US President Donald Trump launched earlier this year in coordination with the Israeli government.

This past weekend, said Iran’s Foreign Ministry, the US carried out “brutal attacks” and “acts of aggression” that pose “a serious threat to international peace and security, rendering futile all efforts made over the past several months to reduce tensions and restore stability in the West Asia region.”

For 47 years the mullahs and their revolutionary guard storm troopers have been fomenting instability and raising tensions.

CONTROLLING THE POLITICAL PIPELINE.

It's Friday, and a reinforcement of a frequent Cold Spring Shops theme, "Perhaps, instead of asking 'who is John Galt?,' dear reader, ask 'who is running for school board or mayor' and 'what is she proposing?'" is in order.

Town Hall's Ashley Evdokimo suggests that the Donk establishment enabled the Democratic Socialists (who might not really be socialists, but I digress) to position a lot of candidates through their Ahab-like obsession with the Golden Golem of Greatness rather than, to use the Sunday show locution, paying attention to the issues the American people care about.

While Republicans and Democrats have poured enormous amounts of energy into presidential politics, media cycles, and national messaging, the DSA has invested in something much less glamorous—but arguably much more important.

The political pipeline.

School boards become city councils. City councils become state legislatures. State legislators become members of Congress. Members of Congress become committee chairs, governors, Cabinet officials, and eventually party leaders. Politics has always been a farm system, and the DSA understands that.

Ironically, while much of the Democratic establishment spent years defining itself in opposition to Donald Trump, the DSA spent those same years defining the future of the Democratic Party. And unless Democrats outright say they’re against it, we can’t “trust” their alliances.

The emergence of Michael Harrington's disciples is also giving Never Trump conservatives heartburn, as they are personae non grata among Republicans and the irritated rump flexing among the Donks will have no truck with them.

LET THE THING BE PRESSED.

The Memorandum of Understanding is a dead letter, kinetic actions that might not involve the United States or Israeli forces, and Dmitri Bolt advises Our President, "Iran Is Already Begging for a Deal. Don't Give Them One."  I can understand Our President's hope to leave those Iranians who are not mad Moslems, such as the ones who took advantage of the weekend of mourning to go to the beach, with the vestiges of a civilian infrastructure once the mullahs bug out.

THAT CONTINUING NEW BIRTH OF FREEDOM.

"Americans Will Never Shut Up or Do As We're Told."

The habits of freedom render impotent the designs of authoritarians. Periodic spasms of government censoriousness—the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the Sedition Act of 1918, COVID-era jawboning of social media companies, serial Trump-era crackdowns on disfavored individuals and media companies—eventually run afoul not just of the Supreme Court's First Amendment jurisprudence (especially strong these days), but also of practiced citizen insistence on speaking freely.

It helps that the authoritarians get high on their own supply.  "Being an 'expert' means never having to say you’re sorry."  Never mind that more modesty, rather than renewed hubris, is in order.  "We saw that in spades during the COVID-19 pandemic, when we were ordered to “follow the science” and abide by wildly disruptive recommendations that turned out to have precious little in the way of science behind them — like six-foot distancing, cloth or paper surgical masks, one-way lanes in grocery stores and of course the lockdowns themselves."

Credentialed Experts, earning their mockery each time they pontificate.

WHERE'S MOJTABA?

Iran's Ayatollah Farewell Tour goes the way such things often go.  "Angry mourners hurl abuse at Iran’s peace negotiators."

Hardliners heckled Abbas Araghchi, the foreign minister, and Masoud Pezeshkian, the president, as the funeral for Ali Khamenei continued into its fourth day.

Crowds shouted at Mr Araghchi: "Death to the traitor who sold out the homeland" and "bisharaf, bisharaf" ("dishonourable, dishonourable") as he moved through the mourners. The word "bisharaf" has a more powerful meaning in Persian than its direct English translation.

It was reported that he left the scene on the back of a motorbike.

Amid the crowd was Saeed Jalili, the hardline former negotiator and the only member of the supreme national security council to vote against the deal.

Some mourners kissed him on the cheek and urged him to "fix the country" – a pointed rebuke to the government staged at the very event meant to project national unity.

It comes after Iran's living former presidents – Mohammad Khatami, Hassan Rouhani and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – were not invited to Sunday's funeral prayer in Tehran.

They did not attend the Sunday procession, though Mr Ahmadinejad, who was thought to have been killed in the war's opening days, surfaced on Monday among the mourners in the capital.

The dead-enders continue to flip drones at ships exiting the Arabian Gulf.  Our President has revoked the "license" Iran has to sell oil.

What comes first, a return of internal unrest in Iran, an Iranian tanker seized by the U. S. Navy on the high seas, or Israel and the USA opening up a can on the mullahs?  Now that Independence Day is over, will that can be opened during the World Cup closing rounds, before the general elections, or after those?

TEMPERING TRUMPY TRIUMPHALISM?

During Freedom Weekend, Our President delivered a speech at Mount Rushmore that had the cheering section on a Trump-friendly network, as well as Pajamas Media's Robert Spencer. cheerful.

Surely, we can compare and contrast Our President's triumphalism with  the sort of speech National Review's Jeffrey Blehar feared.

I remember when a friend of mine, back in the fall of 2024, ran down the list of reasons he was going to vote for Donald Trump. Aside from all of the political ones — which need no rehearsal here — he ended with a throw-in point that actually moved me somewhat: “I don’t want America’s 250th anniversary to be run by Kamala Harris and the Democrats.”

And that was an argument I immediately understood. Imagine the public disgraces that Kamala’s Semiquincentennial would have officially sanctioned in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion. It would have been a yearlong lecture with July 4 a day of solemn reflection and recrimination. After Trump won in November, I heard similar sentiments from some of my friends, even those unpersuaded by Trump themselves: At least he wouldn’t be collaborating with the New York Times 1619 Project to turn America’s 250th into some ghastly yearlong anti-American display.

We could, at least, have had a pool on whether President Harris would be sober or sozzled during such a speech.  But to be spared a no-longer-lucid President Biden or a perpetually scolding President Obama, or a screechy, whether sober or sozzled, President Hillary Clinton is a blessing.

REMEMBERING GORDON WOOD.

Steven Hayward mourns his passing.  "Now we shall mark the occasion next month without his cheerful demeanor and fund of hard-earned wisdom and knowledge, which finds no intellectual equal in this nation of equal citizens. It will not be the same without his presence."  By all means, read his eulogy in full, and pay close attention to his arguments noting that "radicalism" does not have to mean "leftward ho."

It is hard to avoid wondering whether the shocking news of the ghastly accidental death of historian Gordon S. Wood, struck down by a motorist in a shopping center parking lot, is a bad omen, coming within a month of our observance of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Wood has been enjoying a much-deserved spotlight in the runup to the sesquicentennial, but now his voice will be absent on July 4.

Widely acknowledged as the pre-eminent historian of the American Founding in our time, Wood was virtually without peer within academic American history today. There is, however, an arc to his career and thought as a historian that offers encouragement that, in this time of doubt and division about the character and future of American democracy, it is possible to capture and celebrate America’s complex and enduring foundations.

Wood burst onto the scene in 1969 with the publication of The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, a capacious 653-page exploration of the ideas that crystallized into the American Revolution and the Constitution eleven years after the Declaration. Wood had been a student of Bernard Bailyn, one of the leading historians of American political thought in the mid-twentieth century, and Wood built upon Bailyn’s well-regarded Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, but can be said to have advanced and refined a bold new interpretive strand of American historiography—the “civic republican school.”

The civic republican school argued that modern democracy owed less to Lockean liberalism than to a more classically inspired tradition centering on “civic virtue.” It was an explicit alternative to the liberal tradition of natural rights and rugged individualism. Although Wood was restrained in staking out a clear position, his book offered considerable backup for the civic republicans, many of whom were openly seeking an alternative for understanding America and to displace the “liberal tradition” as defended by Louis Hartz and other mid-century historians.

Mr Hayward's colleague at Power Line Scott Johnson offers Hillsdale's Wilfred McClay an opportunity to extend.

[Professor Wood] may have spent his life working mainly in the Ivy League, but he was no blueblood. He was an affable, hardworking guy from a working-class family in Concord, [Massachusetts], and you could hear his origins in his unmistakable Yankee accent. A great historian could also be a regular guy.

Although he studied at Harvard under the august Bernard Bailyn, and excelled in all he did, he acquired none of the mandarin manners of the higher professoriate, but remained himself. His sympathy for the lives and ways of ordinary people informed his most important work, and was part of his visceral love of democratic America.

His book The Radicalism of the American Revolution was in large measure a tribute to the Revolution’s astonishing achievement in ushering in a genuinely new world, one in which feudalism and monarchy were a dead letter, the elite values of pre-Revolutionary classical republicanism had lost their appeal, and there was a general awareness that, in Jefferson’s famous words, “the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.”

Instead, Wood wrote, America would find its greatness in a new way: “by creating a prosperous free society belonging to obscure people with their workaday concerns and their pecuniary pursuits of happiness—common people with their common interests in making money and getting ahead.”

Such sentiments are what one might expect from Power Line, which argues from an institutional-conservative seasoned lightly with populism.

A LAMENT FOR THE AMERICAN HIGH.

In "The GOP and the Corporate Dems Can’t Red-Bait Their Way Out of a Reckoning," Thom Hartmann argues that the recent successes of so-called democratic socialists in Democrat primaries are another spin on Making America Great, "again" optional.

Strip away the scare word and what’s left is far more truly and anciently American than frightening: a country where a person who works 40 hours a week, no matter how complicated or how humble that work might be, can afford a home and a car, take the family on a vacation every year, put the kids through school and college, see a doctor without going bankrupt, and retire with dignity.

That’s the entire “radical” program that Republicans, corporate Democrats, and our billionaire oligarchs are so flipped out about.

Americans have wanted those things for a very long time.

Put "on one income" in that first sentence and you might be writing about what I call The America That Worked^(TM) or perhaps the American High, which was designed away by Wise Experts.  "I devote a lot of space to documenting the ways in which the Trendy and the Deep Thinkers destroyed The America That Worked^(TM), supposedly in the interest of Social Progress or Inclusion or something similarly high-minded."

DO WE REALLY WANT TO MICRO-MANAGE IRAN?

That's a V. D. Hanson rhetorical question, which he answers, at some length, in the negative.  We're still hung up in a "peace process," which might be an exercise in futility.

There are legitimate concerns about the tentative memorandum, including the idea of third-party cash infusions to the regime and claims that violence in Lebanon is somehow Israel's fault. In truth, history shows that Hezbollah, with Iranian financial support, consistently instigates the killing and then whines when Israel—or the U.S. in past conflicts—responds disproportionately.

That said, much of the current hysteria assumes a radical change in Trump's strategy rather than a continuity that has brought us to the current denouement. It also does not consider the wider strategic context of the memorandum, the critical role of domestic public opinion in shaping how wars are conducted, or the broader strategy of isolating and weakening the regime.

A closer look at the current position of the U.S. suggests it has done an enormous amount of fiscal, economic, and military damage to Iran—the full extent of which will not be known until foreigners are allowed into the country.

We might be, he argues, in the worst situation but for all the possible alternatives.

Iran has been militarily devastated, but it does not yet consider itself strategically inert. The regime has little concern for the welfare of its own people and assumes Trump will not retaliate against dual-use targets in the manner of most past presidents who ordered bombing campaigns.

Remember, Trump could have gotten a much better deal had we dealt with the Iranians as we did with the once-defeated Iraqis and Taliban, whose governments were forcibly replaced by ones more agreeable to U.S. demands.

But, with a population of 93 million, Iran is neither Iraq nor Afghanistan, which together required decades of U.S. ground troops, $2 trillion in treasure, 7,000 American deaths, and 53,000 wounded. And in the end, those efforts still did not result in lasting Western-style governments aligned with U.S. interests.

Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq was as large or as formidable as Iran. To fully dictate terms to Iran as if it were an inert protectorate, the U.S. would either have to bomb it to smithereens or send in thousands of ground troops, both politically unpalatable to the American people. Trump must deal with the reality that Americans have been sick of dealing with the Middle East for years. By now, they believe that any costly, enforced regime change on the ground—or any years-long no-fly zone—is not worth the life of a single American soldier.

I suspect Our President still hopes, perhaps ever more forlornly, that Iran's civilians will say no to the mullahs, and that leaving the civilian infrastructure in relatively good shape will pay off.

CHOOSE THE FORM OF YOUR GRIDLOCK.

It happens, I suggest, because any attempt to cobble together a manifesto that well-serves a large, continental country produces unpalatable political bundles.

In the United States, in part, I submit, because the political bundles are too big, the two major parties exist to paper over differences, often under a "lesser of two evils" sort of rubric.  "That elections tend to devolve to a binary choice, and disaffected voters are often reluctant to reject a binary choice between bundles that are each horrible in their own way makes the [re-election of incumbents] more likely to be bad."  I predicted that the slim Democratic majorities taking office in 2021 in Washington would devolve into faction fighting, and the allegedly transformative legislation that came out of the 117th Congress was at the margin of one or two Democrat senators from contested states, and probably filled with earmarks and carve-outs to hold that House coalition together.

A Washington Post contributor, Perry Bacon, contends that there are "four political parties stuffed into a two-party system."  There's nothing magical about there being four coalitions, and the way in which they align themselves can change over time.  In the past two weeks, though, we might have seen that forming a government isn't as easy as past experience suggests.  I know that our civics-books view of governance is one in which the president is the head of government, but the president cannot sign any bills into law until both houses of Congress agree on what to send to the White House, and Congress can't pass anything until the House convenes, and the House can't be sworn in until they name a speaker.  Might we think of the Speaker of the House as the true head of government?

Mr Bacon's taxonomy of coalitions has Trumpian populists and some part of the Republican establishment jockeying for control of what he understands the Republican Party to be.  His characterizations tend to the nasty, because he's inclined to agree with the left factions of the Democrats, but his taxonomy makes sense for now.

The four coalitions might have been motivated to be more at odds as a consequence of the more establishmentarian or institutionalist politicians going along a few days too many with business as usual.

ISRAEL GETS A SAY.

Andrew Fox suggests that's what might be motivating the latest round of phony peace talks.

Iran needs time first. Time to get oil moving through Hormuz again, but in a way that makes the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz conditional, reversible, and politically useful. Tehran’s position goes beyond simply “open” or “closed”. Every barrel, every tanker, every demined shipping lane, and every assurance to markets comes at a price.

That price is leverage over Washington’s relationship with Israel. The conflict in Lebanon between the IDF and Hezbollah is now central. Iran has been explicit that the talks must focus on the Lebanon ceasefire, the terms for reopening Hormuz, oil sanctions, and access to frozen assets. In other words, Hezbollah is being inserted into the US-Iran negotiations as a test of whether Trump can restrain Israel.

This is the Hezbollah-shaped wedge Tehran is trying to drive between Washington and Jerusalem. Iran needs Hezbollah to remain a persistent enough problem that every Israeli action in southern Lebanon can be turned into an Iranian complaint about American bad faith. Israel strikes, Iran claims the memorandum has been breached, and Trump either pressures Israel or risks Hormuz. The point is to trap Washington between oil prices and Israeli operational freedom.

Trump has already shown Tehran where the pressure point lies. The president has today publicly threatened Iran, including over Hormuz and Hezbollah, while JD Vance has tried to project a softer, deal-making tone from Switzerland. Vance said the talks had made “great progress”, while Trump was simultaneously warning that Iran must stop its “proxies in Lebanon” or face harder strikes.

Iran's control over the strait is a wasting asset: every day construction progresses on pipelines from Gulf Arab oilfields to ports beyond the reach of those Iranian speedboats.  Israel remains a sovereign country, as, on paper, does Lebanon, and progress in cooperation between those governments to re-establish Lebanon's monopoly on violence over Hezbollah or any other insurgent or criminal organization, further limits Iran's ability to make mischief.  And who knows what sort of internal politicking is going on in Iran?

Internal allocation is a matter of internal dispute. Hardliners will want money for rearmament and deterrence. The security state will want money for surveillance, prisons, salaries, and coercive capacity. Ordinary Iranians will want relief after war, sanctions, inflation, and exhaustion. Every dollar that returns to Iran becomes part of an internal struggle over what kind of state survives this war.

Here's where the Iranian propensity to dicker as if a faculty committee doling out $1.38 in merit money might work to the advantage of the United States, Israel, and the Gulf Arab countries that are not currently parties to the negotiations.

MAYBE EVERYBODY LOST.

I was being flippant earlier this week, but I'm having trouble finding anyone who likes the "memorandum of understanding," which is nowhere near a treaty, let alone as well defined as Barack Obama thought his never-ratified accord was.  Then, only a few minutes ago, Red State's RC Maxwell dropped "Iranian Hardliners Denounce US Deal as ‘Surrender’ and ‘Path to Colony’."  That was quick: unbundling the opening of the Strait of Hormuz to navigation prior to discussing everything else isn't opening the Strait under Iranian regulation after everything else is signed off upon and the True Believers object.

The strongest backlash has come from the Paydari Front, also known as the Endurance or Steadfastness Front, which is a small but vocal faction of ideological purists. The group positions itself as the guardian of the revolution’s anti-Western principles.

Prominent hardline lawmaker Mahmoud Nabavian, a Paydari-aligned figure and former member of Iran’s nuclear negotiation team, has emerged as the deal’s most outspoken critic. Nabavian warned that the agreement would transform Iran into a “U.S. colony.” He slammed the deal’s requirement that Tehran seek permission from the “Great Satan” for even limited uranium enrichment. “This is surrender,” Nabavian declared, according to reports.

What, did somebody leak the Trump Organization's plans for a hotel and casino on the Caspian Sea?

STOP CLUTTERING OUR UNIFORMS.

"Minor league baseball team cancels Pride Night game after players refuse to wear rainbows."  We're not talking about the players objecting to some sponsor's logo.  "Fewer than nine players on the 28-man roster were willing to uniforms that featured a rainbow design on their sleeves, a team official said."

GROYPER DREAMS.

From time to time, Common Dreams run essays lamenting too much money in politics, particularly money raised by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.  Then there's Jamal Kanj.

There are many lessons to be learned from the lates made-for-Israel war on Iran. The first and most damning is that the war resolved the very crisis it created. Donald Trump celebrated the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and the lifting of the blockade against Iran. Two conditions that were fully in place before Benjamin Netanyahu dog walked Trump into this war. The agreement that concluded the war took us back to exactly where we stood before America spent $200 billion, and where Americans continue to pay Israeli surcharge tax at the pump and grocery stores.

Those two conditions ostensibly being the terms of Barack Obama's time-limited agreement involving nuclear weapons, and more evidently being the free passage of ships in and out of the Arabian Gulf.  I'm still reviewing commentary on the memorandum of understanding, which, first, is not a treaty; and second, I suspect is merely another Sitzkrieg before the bombers fly again, and will note only that until last week, free passage of ships was only going to happen if the thirteen other items on Iran's wish list were fulfilled.  I still view most of the items on that memorandum as wishful thinking.

A FACULTY MEETING, WITH HIGH EXPLOSIVES.

There is a fourteen point "memorandum of understanding" circulating that appears to be what diplomats are using to, for the moment, restore the free transit of oil at market prices through the Strait of Hormuz.  The Institute for the Study of War offer their analysis in their 16 June briefing.

DID EVERYONE LOSE?

Reason's Liz Wolfe asks the obvious question about the so-far-unseen "memorandum of understanding" continuing the ceasefire in Asia Minor.  "A digital preliminary memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Iran has been signed, leading to an opening of the Strait of Hormuz and a 60-day pause in fighting while final details get hashed out."  That's consistent with something we noted about two weeks ago.  "From that perspective, letting Iran's government export oil is splitting a gain from trade harvested by consumers of Gulf Arab oil and fertilizers. But U.S. forces must remain on station, which brings a different set of risks with it."  And so it might seem, or not.  Our President is carrying on about ships sailing freely and the Iranians are making noises about tolling, even if they call it "providing security" or something.

It's messy emergence, Ms Wolfe suggests, not continued evolution of that rules-based international order.

We still don't know what types of restrictions Iran will agree to with regard to its nuclear program, nor do we know what Israel will do with regard to Hezbollah and the fighting in southern Lebanon. We don't know how U.S.-Israeli relations will be impacted in the long run. (Tensions between Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been rather high during these last few weeks.) We don't know whether Iran will, in fact, keep the Strait of Hormuz open, or whether we'll see it mess around with the strait to gain leverage over the U.S. once again.

"Months of fighting revealed that multiple countries can impose costs," wrote Foreign Policy's Will Todman, "but none can impose order."

"The tactical and operational successes that the U.S. and Israeli militaries achieved masked a deeper strategic defeat, with neither securing the political objectives cited to justify the war in the first place," argued Todman. "The Iranian regime survived and emerged more hard-line, and it discovered a new, powerful negotiating chip in closing the Strait of Hormuz." But even bigger picture: "The war did not produce a clear victor or a more stable regional order. Instead, it accelerated fragmentation, deepened insecurity, and imposed costs on every key regional and global power involved, including Iran, the Arab Gulf states, Russia, and China. The war demonstrated that no state will be able to navigate the new era of global disorder unscathed."

Also in Reason, Matthew Petti contends, "The U.S. and Iran have moved to the next stage of the peace process. Hawks on all sides are terrified that it will succeed."

A BOTCHED DECAPITATION REFUTES A FILING CABINET FULL OF POSITION PAPERS.

John Feffer's "Pete Hegseth’s D-Day Remarks Prove the US Is No Longer an Ally to European Democracy" is a predictably silly appeal to Foreign Policy in Focus types, you know, the sort of conscience-cowboy for whom "rules-based international order" is a Holy Incantation and blaming America first is as instinctive as splitting tens.