Israel Plays Its Cards

Dear Weekend Jolter,

The event speculated about in foreign policy circles for decades has happened, and is happening. As Phil Klein writes, Israel’s strike on Iran’s nuclear program “is the big one.”

It’s too soon to know the extent of Israel’s operation, which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said could take days, and certainly too soon to know how far Iran is willing to go -- or, perhaps more relevantly, is capable of going -- to retaliate. The regime launched dozens of missiles at Israel on Friday.

In the near term, Mark Wright observes that the question of whether Israel has the logistical capabilities to conduct such long-range strikes has been resoundingly answered. Unclear still is whether its munitions can penetrate through to all its targets. To the question of why now, Phil explains:

One, Iran is more vulnerable than ever, and so this was a unique window to act. . . .

Two, President Trump was in the White House. . . .

Three, and likely the most significant, time was running out. Even the IAEA, hardly a Zionist outlet, had assessed that Iran had ratcheted up enrichment — and its report found that Iran had already enriched 400kg of uranium well above civilian levels and, with further refinement, could have enough for ten nuclear bombs.

The operation already is confirmed to have taken out top Iranian military commanders and nuclear scientists, in this new war in the Middle East. Most likely, the strikes pulverized in an instant any chance of a Trump-era nuclear deal with Iran; President Trump doesn't seem to think so, though he is making clear his support for Israel all the same. How much his administration knew and even tacitly consented to in advance of Israel’s operation isn't yet clear -- nor is the extent of any future U.S. involvement. Noah Rothman writes that Israel is a worthy partner, its actions “justified by any number of casus belli that no other nation would be expected to just stoically endure. The work it is doing on the ground and in the skies over Iran directly advances U.S. interests. Defanging the Iranian regime, if successful, will contribute to a more stable and peaceful status quo in the region.” In the meantime, “heightened vigilance will be necessary in the coming weeks” as Iran may rely on asymmetric tactics to respond, both in the region and in the West.

Read more from NR’s editorial, here.

As the world watches the Middle East, we have conflagrations still at home -- fires unlikely to be extinguished just because Israel/Iran is pushing them temporarily off the front page. So, if you’ll permit one more item before the links . . .

Democrats Have a Second Chance to Handle Riots Right

If another pandemic breaks out on President Trump’s watch, be sure of one thing: The federal government will not be the source of any push for masking, social-distancing, and school closures. The administration wouldn’t want to relive the 2020 experience.

Likewise, this administration shows no appetite for anything resembling a repeat of the other national convulsion from the final year of Trump’s first term -- riots in response to the killing of George Floyd.

Did anybody really think Trump 47 would go easy on the next outbreak of street chaos? In California? When the instigating issue is immigration enforcement?

This is not to say that Trump doesn’t risk overreaching or escalating the situation by putting boots on the ground, over the objections of local Democrats, in response to the L.A. riots that broke out over ICE raids. But, as Dan McLaughlin writes with the benefit of “2020” vision, any present-day rioters who thought they could demonstrate “the impotence of authority in the face of the raw power of the street” engaged in a “catastrophic misreading of the man and his incentives.”

To the contrary, Dan writes, Trump views disorder in L.A. in these circumstances “as a gift.”

This being the case, local Democratic leaders would do well to apply a firm hand this time -- on their own -- to those protests that cross the line into rioting, looting, arson, and other mayhem, even if they sympathize with the anti-ICE cause.

San Francisco, now led by the relatively moderate Mayor Daniel Lurie, provides one example worth emulating. From the Wall Street Journal:

Thousands of people marched for miles Monday night before police declared an unlawful assembly around 10 p.m. A contingent that refused to disperse appeared to resist arrest, and were met with force by San Francisco police, who warned they would deploy chemical agents, batons and projectiles if anyone else tried to flee.

That came after about 150 arrests by San Francisco police on Sunday—more than double the arrests reported by police in Los Angeles.

The mayor vowed that the city would not tolerate “destructive behavior,” while also saying he disagrees with federal immigration-enforcement tactics and understands why people are protesting.

Was that so hard?

Local Democrats capable of resisting the pull of resistance theater should strive for the same practical balance, as protests spread and potentially converge with planned anti-Trump demonstrations. Especially now, when the administration shows no leeway with rioters (rioters who aren’t storming the U.S. Capitol, that is), the Democrats who run America’s cities should want to demonstrate competence in policing the streets. It would be good for their damaged brand -- and their constituents. And what better way to keep or get military personnel out of their jurisdictions than to show that their officers don’t tolerate lawlessness? Mayors and council members can register their objections to ICE raids without allowing hooligans to sow chaos and torment their neighbors using ICE as an excuse.

Noah Rothman argues that progressives still instinctively see such rioters as “their people” -- but that their political future depends on their defying that instinct:

Democrats have talked themselves into the idea that they have to walk a rhetorical tightrope amid outbreaks of left-wing violence, and that has done inestimable damage to the party’s brand. They must find the courage to jettison this millstone around their necks.

Back in 2020, states and cities eventually imposed curfews, activated the National Guard, and made thousands of arrests. But roughly two dozen people died in incidents linked to the political unrest, researchers found; many more were injured including police officers; and damage to property totaled more than $1 billion. Local officials struggled to get control of their cities, with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz hesitating to deploy the Guard to Minneapolis, Portland grappling with protests and riots all year, and Seattle tolerating for several weeks an anarchic “autonomous zone.”

Cities should not make the same mistakes in 2025.

NAME. RANK. LINK.

EDITORIALS

The aid was not the point: Greta’s Denouement

When MAID in America isn’t a good thing: New York Embraces the Culture of Death

On the L.A. riots: Restoring Order in Los Angeles

On the bomb: Tulsi Gabbard Bombs American History

ARTICLES

Andrew McCarthy: The Padilla Incident and the Greater Peril

Andrew McCarthy: The Abrego Garcia Indictment Raises More Questions Than It Answers

Rich Lowry: Abrego Garcia Was Never Simply a ‘Maryland Father’

Audrey Fahlberg: JD Vance, Susie Wiles Asked Elon Musk to Tone Down Rhetoric Toward Trump in Phone Call

Mike Pompeo: America Loses If Russia Wins

Noah Rothman: Greta Thunberg’s Overdue Shaming

Jim Geraghty: The Big Business of Foreign Students at American Universities

Will Swaim: Don’t Overlook the Union Factor in California’s Chaos

Brittany Bernstein: ‘Fiery, But Mostly Peaceful’ Riots Make a Comeback in Los Angeles

Jeffrey Blehar: David Hogg Is Fired

Abigail Anthony: Biles Backflips on Protecting Women

Robert P. George & Matthew X. Wilson: Pro-Pornography Progressives Are Wrong About Young Men

Christian Schneider: The Government Is Not Going to Save Hollywood

Moira Gleason: Smithsonian Privately Admits to Straying from Nonpartisan Mission amid Trump Feud

Moira Gleason: Double Stabbing Rocks Dupont Circle During WorldPride

Juan Sebastián Chamorro: My Life as a Nicaraguan in Exile

CAPITAL MATTERS

Dominic Pino, with some advice for the Senate: Don’t Expand the SALT Deduction. It Only Encourages New York

LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.

Brian Allen sees Dalí in a new light, and other highlights from a Madison Avenue show: The Surrealist Collage Show in Sync with Our Freaky Times

Armond White appreciates the John Wick spin-off for what it is: Ballerina’s Action-Movie Encore

FROM THE NEW, AUGUST 2025 ISSUE OF NR

Charles C. W. Cooke: In Search of Normalcy: What the Two Parties Aren’t Giving America

Caroline Downey: A Cold War Between the Sexes

Jimmy Quinn: How America’s Universities Handed the Keys to China

Vahaken Mouradian: Metalheads Are Saving Live Music

Jack Butler: Bad Bets: The New Culture of Sports Gambling

Andrew Stuttaford: Close Encounters with Clowns and Aliens in Extraterrestrial Country

And why not? I’ll plug my own piece: What We Lost When We Stopped Making Home Movies

IF YOU EXPERIENCE DIZZINESS, NAUSEA, OR MILD TO MODERATE DISCOMFORT, IT’S PROBABLY NOT THE EXCERPTS

The new issue of NR is up. Lots on offer here, but how about we start with Caroline Downey’s examination of the partisan gender gap -- now a chasm:

At a recent college reunion, I rendezvoused with an old professor, a wise classical liberal who inspired me to pursue a career in journalism. After inquiring about me and my class, he mentioned that he had just celebrated his 43rd wedding anniversary with his wife, who happens to be a Democrat.

I thought, “Fat chance of that today.”

For my generation, Gen Z, reaching such a milestone is hard to fathom, in large part because of the diverging politics of young men and women. In the past 25 years, the gender partisan gap has nearly doubled. Donald Trump turned a predictable rift into a gaping chasm: In the 18-to-29 cohort, he won 56 percent of men but only 40 percent of women. Young men have gradually been ditching the Democrats for the past decade, but they really fled in the last year, a postelection Public Religion Research Institute survey reports, with 38 percent of Gen Z men now more likely to identify as Republican versus 20 percent of Gen Z women.

The widening of the Gen Z partisan gender gap has coincided with the decline of marriage, which young men and women continue to postpone or forgo altogether. The Institute for Family Studies reports that while 85 percent of 25-year-old women and 75 percent of 25-year-old men were married in 1967, just 20 percent and 23 percent respectively are married today.

Unwed women without children have moved toward the Democrats for several years. Without marriage as a financial and emotional anchor, young women have started to view the state as a “back-up husband,” as author Louise Perry has suggested. While young women develop more trust in government as a replacement for a spouse’s support, young men grow more antiestablishment. . . .

Democrats are determined to crack the code of young men; it’s crucial for their electoral viability. But they got themselves into this mess by ostracizing young men as the problem. Most recently, the left has decried men’s interest in eating red meat, fitness, and other self-improvement activities as fringe pursuits. But to discover the roots of the disdain, we must go back to the 1970s.

Speaking of the leftward lurch in economics, Milton Friedman once remarked, “We’re all Keynesians now.”

For decades, the culture has said, “We’re all feminists now.”

Though it started with suffrage, equal opportunity, and other advancements of women’s rights, feminism lost the plot around the 1970s, when it told young men to repent for the sins of the patriarchy and then shelve themselves. By the mid-2010s, circa Me Too, mainstream feminism had devolved into an indictment of “toxic masculinity.” Over time, young men began to believe that feminism’s goal was not equality but their displacement and punishment. Today, only 43 percent of Gen Z men identify as feminists compared with 61 percent of Gen Z women, according to the Survey Center on American Life.

From NR’s editorial, on the journey of Greta Thunberg:

An embarrassing public relations stunt wound down to quiet anticlimax over the weekend, as the Israeli navy intercepted the boat of celebrity activist Greta Thunberg and her so-called Freedom Flotilla before they reached the shores of Gaza. Thunberg and her team were purporting to “break the siege” of Gaza — she labels Israel’s war against Hamas a “genocide” — by carrying less than one truck’s worth of relief supplies to a population whose only difficulty in accessing aid comes from the threat of Hamas.

After being successfully interdicted by the Israelis without incident, she was invited by the government to watch footage of the October 7 massacres assembled from terrorist cameras on the day. She refused, later saying: “They tried to make us watch all kinds of propaganda videos, but I didn’t watch. This is nothing compared to what is happening in Gaza, which is in desperate need of humanitarian aid.”

Nobody should be shocked that someone as dogmatic as Greta Thunberg failed to reach a sudden moral epiphany about Zionism by the end of her journey. But the bloodless, unemotional tone of her response is itself a perfect encapsulation of the implacable mindlessness of the pro-Palestinian movement she represents, one fueled by rhyming slogans (“From the river to the sea . . .”) and buzzwords meant to trigger outrage and urgency: “genocide,” “humanitarian crisis,” “starvation.”

. . . Israel is fighting a war against a brutal enemy that seized hostages in a surprise massacre, cloaks itself among its civilian population, and avows the destruction of Israel as its inalterable goal. But large swaths of the younger generation — the left-wing products of our modern media and educational environment — believe these claims to be almost axiomatically true.

Jim Geraghty deep-dives into the business of foreign students at American universities and specifically looks at the nat-sec implications where Chinese students are concerned:

The pattern of Chinese foreign students reflects that of foreign students overall — 50,000 to 100,000 each year throughout the 1990s and 2000s, tripling during the Obama years, and remaining close to 400,000 per year from 2017 to 2020. Since the pandemic, it’s dropped to a bit below 300,000 per year.

In 2017, the Chinese government passed the National Intelligence Law, which declares all Chinese citizens are required to “support, assist, and cooperate with national intelligence efforts,” regardless of their location. So if the Chinese Ministry of State Security comes along and demands that Chinese students start reporting on what’s being researched in the labs at the university they’re attending, any Chinese student who doesn’t cooperate can be arrested. Or, in quite a few cases, the target’s family can be threatened. The Chinese MSS relies heavily on “nontraditional collectors” — foreign students, emigrants, and Chinese-Americans with family back in China — who can be threatened, strong-armed, coerced, or bribed into becoming spies.

Back in 2018, FBI director Christopher Wray told the Senate Intelligence Committee, “the use of nontraditional collectors, especially in the academic setting, whether it’s professors, scientists, students, we see in almost every field office that the FBI has around the country. It’s not just in major cities. It’s in small ones as well. It’s across basically every discipline. And I think the level of naïveté on the part of the academic sector about this creates its own issues. They’re exploiting the very open research and development environment that we have, which we all revere, but they’re taking advantage of it.”

(Keep in mind that the Chinese government is more than happy to bribe non-Chinese citizens with access to American secrets or other sensitive information. Back in 2023, Charles Lieber, the former chair of Harvard University’s Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department, was convicted of lying to federal authorities about his affiliation with the People’s Republic of China’s Thousand Talents Program. Lieber’s program did research for the U.S. Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health. The Wuhan University of Technology paid Lieber $50,000 per month, living expenses of up to $150,000, and approximately $1.5 million to conduct joint research at WUT. Yes, the trail always leads back to Wuhan.)

Whether we like it or not, there is a significant security risk with Chinese students that does not exist for any other country. Again, this is a matter of national origin, not ethnicity. There is no particular espionage risk from Taiwanese foreign students.

In a guest column, Mike Pompeo explains the stakes in the confrontation over Ukraine:

The world is watching Ukraine, and what they see will determine America’s standing on the world stage for decades to come. If Russia emerges from this conflict appearing victorious, America’s interests — and those of our partners in Europe and around the world — will be severely damaged.

This isn’t hyperbole — it’s the stark reality of how power projection works in the 21st century. When adversaries believe they can defeat American interests and allies without consequence, they grow bolder. When allies doubt America’s commitment to their security, they seek other arrangements — hedging with the Chinese Communist Party, or the Islamic Republic of Iran, or both.

These dynamics are already underway, and a perceived Russian victory would only accelerate them. If America relinquishes its leadership of the free world, our economy, our security, and our future will be in peril. Make no mistake, leading the world is costly, but the benefits far exceed those costs. The alternative — ceding spheres of influence or global leadership to brutal regimes that want our grandchildren to live in tyranny — is far too high a price to pay.

As I was standing in Odessa last month — just days after Russian strikes on the city — the stakes were crystal clear. Ukraine’s remarkable resilience, including the recent stunning attacks on Russian strategic bombers deep inside Russian territory, proves that this war is far from over. However, Ukraine’s courage alone cannot solve America’s credibility crisis, which was created by years of Obama-Biden weakness and strategic drift.

Every day that Russia maintains its territorial gains in Ukraine, America appears weaker to our adversaries. The authoritarian axis of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea is already testing our resolve precisely because they sense American weakness fostered by the Obama-Biden doctrine of leading from behind. A negotiated settlement that allows Putin to claim victory by recognizing Russian control of Ukrainian territory would transform this opportunistic cooperation into a coordinated challenge to American power.

CODA

I recently discovered this uplifting Appalachian collaboration. Escape with it for a few minutes.

Thanks for reading. And Happy Father’s Day, dads.