Israel’s small volley of missiles hit their intended targets, to the point of zeroing in on the very launchers designed to stop such incoming ordnance.

The target was near the Natanz enrichment facility. That proximity was by design. Israel showed Iran it could take out the very anti-missile battery designed to thwart an attack on its nearby nuclear facility.

The larger message sent to the world was that Israel could send a retaliatory barrage at Iranian nuclear sites with reasonable assurances that the incoming attacks could not be stopped. By comparison, Iran’s earlier attack on Israel was much greater and more indiscriminate. It was also a huge flop, with an estimated 99 percent of the more than 320 drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles failing to hit their planned targets.

Moreover, it was reported that more than 50 percent of Iran’s roughly 115-120 ballistic missiles failed at launch or malfunctioned in flight.

Collate these facts, and it presents a disturbing corrective to Iran’s non-stop boasts of soon possessing a nuclear arsenal that will obliterate the Jewish state.

Consider further the following nightmarish scenarios: Were Iranian nuclear-tipped missiles ever launched at Israel, they could pass over, in addition to Syria and Iraq, either Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the West Bank, Gaza, or all four. In the cases of Jordan and Saudi Arabia, such trajectories would constitute an act of war, especially considering that some of Iran’s recent aerial barrages were intercepted and destroyed over Arab territory well before they reached Israel.

Iran’s strike prompted Arab nations, the US, the UK, and France to work in concert to destroy almost all of Iran’s drones. For Iran, that is a premonition of the sort of sophisticated aerial opposition it might face if it ever decided to stage a nuclear version.

Even if half of Iran’s ballistic missiles did launch successfully, only a handful apparently neared their intended targets—in sharp contrast to Israel’s successful attack on Iranian missile batteries. Is it thus conceivable that any Iranian-nuclear-tipped missile launched toward Israel might pose as great a threat to Iran itself or its neighbors as to Israel?

And even if such missiles made it into the air and even if they successfully traversed Arab airspace, there is still an overwhelming chance they would be neutralized before detonating above Israel.

Any such launch would warrant an immediate Israeli response. And the incoming bombs and missiles would likely have a 100 percent certainty of evading Iran’s countermeasures and hitting their targets.

Now that the soil of both Iran and Israel is no longer sacred and immune from attack, the mystique of the Iranian nuclear threat has dissipated.

It should be harder for the theocracy to shake down Western governments for hostage bribes, sanctions relief, and Iran-deal giveaways on the implied threat of Iran successfully nuking the Jewish state.

The new reality is that Iran has goaded an Israel that has numerous nuclear weapons and dozens of nuclear-tipped missiles in hardened silos and on submarines. Tehran has zero ability to stop any of these missiles or sophisticated fifth-generation Israeli aircraft armed with nuclear bombs and missiles.

Iran must now fear that if it launched 2-3 nuclear missiles, there would be overwhelming odds that they would either fail at launch, go awry in the air, implode inside Iran, be taken down over Arab territory by Israel’s allies, or be knocked down by the tripartite Israel anti-missile defense system.

Add it all up, and the Iranian attack on Israel seems a historic blunder. It showed the world the impotence of an Iranian aerial assault at the very time it threatens to go nuclear. It revealed that an incompetent Iran may be as much a threat to itself as to its enemies. It opened up a new chapter in which its own soil, thanks to its attack on Israel, is no longer off limits to any Western power.

Its failure to stop a much smaller Israel response, coupled with the overwhelming success of Israel and its allies in stopping a much larger Iranian attack, reminds the Iranian autocracy that its shrill rhetoric is designed to mask its impotence and to hide its own vulnerabilities from its enemies.

And the long-suffering Iranian people?

The truth will come out that its own theocracy hit the Israeli homeland with negligible results and earned a successful, though merely demonstrative, Israeli response in return.

So Iranians will learn their homeland is now vulnerable and, for the future, no longer off limits.

And they will conclude that Israel has more effective allies than Iran and that their own ballistic missiles may be more suicidal than homicidal.

As a result, they may conclude that the real enemies of the Iranian nation are not the Jewish people of Israel after all, but their own unhinged Islamist theocrats.

(Daily Signal)—Prior to Oct. 7, there were roughly 2 million Arab citizens of Israel but no Jewish citizens in the Gaza Strip. Gazans in 2006 voted in Hamas to rule them. It summarily executed its Palestinian Authority rivals.

Hamas canceled all future scheduled elections. It established a dictatorship and diverted hundreds of billions of dollars in international aid to build a vast underground labyrinth of military installations.

‘Collateral Damage’

Hamas began the Israel-Hamas war by deliberately targeting civilians. It massacred them on Oct. 7 when it invaded Israel during a time of peace and holidays. It sent more than 7,000 rockets into Israeli cities for the sole purpose of killing noncombatants.

Hamas has no vocabulary for the collateral damage of Israeli civilians, since it believes any Jewish death under any circumstances is cause for celebration.

Hamas places its terrorist centers beneath and inside hospitals, schools, and mosques. Why? Israel is assumed to have more reservations about collaterally hitting Gaza civilians than Hamas does about exposing them as human shields.

‘Disproportionate’

We are told that Israel wrongly uses disproportionate force to retaliate in Gaza. But it does so because no nation can win a war without disproportionate violence that hurts the enemy more than it is hurt by the enemy.

The U.S. incinerated German and Japanese cities with disproportionate force to end a war both Axis powers started. In Iraq, the American military nearly leveled Fallujah and Mosul by disproportional force to root out Islamic gunmen hiding among innocents.

Hamas has objections to disproportionate violence—but only when it is achieved by Israel and not Hamas.

‘Two-State Solution’

Prior to Oct. 7, there was a de facto three-state solution, given that Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza were all separate states ruled by their own governments, two of which were illegitimate without scheduled elections.

It was not Israel but the people of Gaza and the West Bank who institutionalized the “from river to the sea” agenda of destroying its neighbor.

Israel would have been content to live next to an autonomous Arab Gaza and West Bank that did not seek to destroy Israel in multigenerational efforts to form its own “one-state solution.”

‘Cease-Fire’

The so-called international community is demanding Israel agree to a “cease-fire.” But there was already a cease-fire prior to Oct. 7. Hamas broke it by massacring 1,200 Jews and taking over 250 hostages.

Hamas violated that peace because it thought it could gain leverage over Israel by murdering Jews.

Hamas now demands another cease-fire because it thinks it is no longer able to murder more unarmed Jews. Instead, it now fears that Israel will destroy Hamas in the way Hamas sought but failed to destroy Israel.

Did Hamas call for a cease-fire after the first 500 Jews it massacred on Oct. 7?

‘Ramadan’

President Joe Biden believes that the Muslim religious holiday of Ramadan requires Israel to agree to a cease-fire.

But did either Hamas or any other Arab military ever respect Jewish—or even its own—religious holidays?

The Oct. 7 massacre was timed to catch Israelis unaware while they celebrated the Jewish religious holidays of Simchat Torah, Shemini Torah, and Shemini Atzeret on Shabbat.

Moreover, Hamas’ surprise attack was deliberately timed to commemorate the earlier sneak Arab attack on Israel some 50 years earlier.

On Oct. 6, 1973, the Israelis were the target of a surprise attack when celebrating the religious holiday of Yom Kippur. Arab armies also assumed they would achieve greater surprise when attacking during their own religious holiday of Ramadan.

So, Arab militaries fight opportunistically during Jewish holidays and their own Islamic holidays. Egyptians and Syrians still boast of their 1973 surprise attack on Israel as the Ramadan War.

Only Westerners, not Arabs, believe there should be no war during Ramadan.

‘Civilian Casualties’

Israel risks the lives of its soldiers to prevent civilian deaths. Hamas risks the lives of its civilians to prevent terrorists’ deaths.

Israel considers it a failure, but Hamas considers it globally advantageous, when more civilians die than its soldiers.

‘Foreign Aid’

The Biden administration threatens to cut off or slow-walk aid to Israel if it continues to retaliate against Hamas, even though Hamas started the war.

So the administration promises to give more aid to Gaza after the Oct. 7 Hamas massacres than it gave to Gaza before Hamas’ attack.

‘Prisoners’

The international community that favors Hamas nevertheless knows it would be safer to be a prisoner of Israel than of Hamas.

It knows women are not going to be raped in custody by Israelis, but are by Hamas. And the unarmed are more likely to be mutilated and decapitated by Hamas than Israelis.

Is the international community more likely to charge Israel than Hamas for war crimes because the Jewish state seeks to avoid civilian deaths that Hamas finds useful?

In the last ten years, we’ve witnessed the Russian collusion hoax, calls from military officers and analysts for extra-legal interventions and coups, the Alfa ping hoax, the drink bleach hoax, the “suckers” D-Day hoax, the celebrities’ contest about the best way to decapitate, stab, blow up, shoot, or incinerate Trump, the 2016 leftwing postelection effort to turn state electors into “faithless” apostates to elect Hillary, the nutty Mark Milley call to his Chinese counterpart, the Antifa/BLM riotous months of 2020 and effort to storm the White House grounds, the two first-term impeachments, the laptop “Russian disinformation” hoax, the pee accusation, the “51 intelligence authorities” ruse, the FBI hiring of Twitter censors to suppress unwanted news, the Senate trial of a private citizen, the January 6 “insurrection” where “five police officers were killed” lie, the farcical two Republican members of the Jan 6 committee, the attempt to remove Trump from state ballots, the insane E. Jean Carroll suit, the Letitia James “find me the man, and I’ll find you the crime” writ, the monstrous $355 million fine growing daily to $450, the Alvin Bragg bootstrapping of an inert federal suit, the Fani Willis/Nathan Wade circus, the Jack Smith antithesis to Robert Hur’s twin investigation, the effort to bankrupt the Republican nominee, and of course the constant calls to pack the court (when the Left lost the majority), to end the filibuster (when Democrats control the Senate), to add two new states and four new senators (provided they are DC and Puerto Rico) and to end the Electoral College (once the Left lost the surety of the reliable blue wall).

What is the effect of all this decade-long civil strife on the 2024 voter? There are two knowns and two unknowns from this unprecedented effort to destroy rather than defeat at the polls Donald J. Trump.

First, we now know that the more they have tried to destroy Trump through media lies and distortions, lawfare, and extra-legal means, the greater his resiliency and popularity.

Two, we also realize that the greater the anti-Trump hysteria, venom, and furor on the Left, the more leftists melt down and project their own paranoias onto Trump.

They think something like: “If we were Trump, and we were smeared with the stuff we are dishing out, we know what we do to our tormentors when we got power. So naturally Trump will do to us what we would to us in his place.”

Their projection then turns into our now daily unhinged screams that Trump will “take revenge” and “demand retribution”, ensure a “bloodbath”, and “end democracy”—and “therefore we have to double down to employ even more extra-legal means to destroy him”.

Of the unknowns, we are somewhat unsure about the cumulative effect of this historic effort to warp the electoral system to destroy a candidate, and in at least two regards.

One, as the Left ramps up its hatred and frenzy over the next seven months before the election (and they surely will), what will be effect on Independents, swing voters, and the undecided? Will they grow incensed at the damage the Left is doing to the country and react by supporting Trump all the more?

Or, alternatively, will they finally curl up, fetal-like, with hands over ears, and simply whimper and wish for someone to make all this conundrum go away—and along with it the disrupter Trump, who, however much the victim, still somehow is responsible for the insane reaction he elicits from the left?

As far as the second unknown in the upcoming months, could or would Trump as the Happy Warrior better finesse the vitriol to his own advantage by joking about his tormentors’ insanity, using Reaganesque humor to ridicule his critics, or simply shrug, stick to business, ignore the madness, and press on? Can he not unite the country by rising above the tit-for-tat taunts and put-downs?

That is, should he not avoid his gratuitous slights (often against fellow Republicans like DeSantis and Haley), curb silly stuff like “birdbrain” and the usual social media ridicule?

Or does it even matter at this late date—given the Left will distort anything Trump says anyway—as we just witnessed with the “bloodbath” psychodrama, and the laughable spin to suggest Trump was calling for insurrection rather than the damage Biden will do to the automotive industry?

Are we reaching a point, then, where it does not matter how carefully Trump speaks and how ecumenical he might sound, given whatever he says or does will still be distorted given the existential hatred for who he is, what he represents, and what his agendas might portend?

Add up what we know and the things we know we don’t know, and it is going to be a wild, dangerous next seven months in which we are going to witness things from the Left never seen before in this country.

(X)—Here it is: we give billions of dollars to Jordan, Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority—presumably as “please be nice to us” protection / insurance money.

All three autocracies then run with the lie that a terrorist/jihadist (our media prefers “militant”) rocket, in flight on its way to kill Israeli civilians, which had fallen short at a Gazan hospital parking lot, was in fact an Israeli “war crime” of bombing a hospital building that wiped out “500 civilians.”

That was not just a multifaceted lie, but a monstrous and demonstrable one.

What followed was weary boilerplate.

You know the now half-century-old drill: the usual riots and mobs throughout the Middle East sprout up on cue, shouting hatred of Jews and death to the U.S. Our terrified aid-recipient Arab autocratic governments snub a visiting American president. Our worried diplomats show contrition (Secretary of State Blinken promptly suggested lowering our flags to half-mast at our embassies abroad in sympathy with the hospital victims of the supposed Israeli air strike).

At home the tired left-wing campus and urban demonstrations erupt—along with a dramatic takeover of the Capitol building, all confident in the usual legal exemptions extended to such left-wing protests.

(But wasn’t it established by AG Merrick Garland that storming the Capitol and disrupting congressional proceedings was an “insurrection“ designed to destroy democracy and thus punishable by felony charges likely leading to considerable prison time— with congressional investigations and criminal charges looming for any elected official who purportedly encouraged such an insurrection, as Rep. Rashida Tlaib did for this one?)

All this madness was followed by the predictable Biden reaction of printing and sending yet another $100 million of fungible “please don’t hate us” money to terrorist-run enclaves—even as Iran confidently awaits its promised $6 billion ransom payment.

Again, the Biden message is that if Islamic Jihad had just hit its intended target and only killed more Jewish civilians, then there would have been no problem (cf. confirmed from the mouth of Biden himself: “It’s that old thing: gotta learn how to shoot straight.”): just shoot straight, terrorists, and then no riots, no snubs, and for now no need for more American Danegeld.

At some point, will someone state the obvious: the more a bankrupt America appeases the Middle East, sends aid and money, takes in its refugees, and lectures democratic Israel, all the more the Arab world shows contempt, and all the closer we get to a theater-wide war— predicated on the idea that a loud but contemptibly weak America is at the mercy of unstable governments and unhinged throngs? And thus it can neither protect its friends nor advance its interests.

Perhaps the Arab world is trying to tell us something and we should listen.

I think their own conduct and actions convey a warning/message to us something like the following:

​‘America needs to stop the Biden empty rhetoric now. On what evidence exactly can you Americans claim that Hamas does not have wide support in Gaza? After all, Hamas certainly resonates even on your own American campuses. And the methods some of us choose to slaughter Israelis are our own business, not yours. And by the way, leave it us to deal with our own fellow-Islamists in Iran.’

In response to the implicit messaging of our “allies” and the Islamic street, we do need to stop the empty rhetoric, but in the Jacksonian ‘don’t tread on me’ sense: vastly increase our defenses, prepare for the worst, return to maximum fossil fuel production, stop importing oil and hatred of America from the Middle East, cease unrestricted immigration and yank visas, enforce our immigration laws—and allow Israel to defend itself from pre-civilizational murderers.

In the last 32 months they have been proven utterly disastrous. Hamas has gone full ISIS, and is now in addition reportedly beheading captured Israeli soldiers.

Note that the Mahmoud Abbas, “president” for life of the PNA, and a recipient of U.S. aid, has been cheering on Hamas.

So of course have the usual suspects, such as the hard Western Left, the Ivy-League pampered student crowd, the Squad constituencies, the Taliban, Qatar, especially Iran, the parent of the current mass killing, and even Turkey.

Is it the mass mutilations, the rapes, the desecrations of corpses, the beheadings, the murdering of women, the elderly, and children, that so excites them all—as if they were gleefully watching sacrificial victims marched up to the top of an Aztec temple in ancient Tenochtitlán?

Or rather is their frenzy due to unspoken terror that Hamas at last has gone too far in its premodern savagery? There are now no more of its patrons with the power to call off the IDF. And so they may finally get the existential war that Hamas always for decades had bragged about and begged for.

And the proper response to all this here in the U.S.?

All monies to the West Bank and Gaza should be immediately cut off. The Iran transfers, if our State Department’s pleas are correct that they are not yet finalized, should be stopped immediately.

Sanctions and embargos should be placed on all Iranian exports. The alternative would be to keep subsidizing those who provide the wherewithal for murderers, rapists and precivilizational mutilators.

If it is true that Hamas killer-masterminds have been residing in Qatar, and, as often has been alleged, enjoying Qatar as a financial clearing-house for terrorist operations, and given Qatar has been blaming Israel for its own murdered, then why do we persist in basing the United States Central Command (USCC) and United State Air Force Central Command (USAFCC) at Qatar government facilities?

There are, of course, realist arguments for our relationship with Qatar. But the world in the Middle East has now irrevocably changed and we need to make the necessary adjustments and separate from this de facto Al Jazeerist enemy.

Expect some terrorists to attempt to join the swarm at our open border. And soon “refugees” from Gaza and the West Bank will be likely demanding asylum here in the Great Satan.

In reaction, we should not only bar all travel from Palestinian territories into the US, as well as from Iran and Qatar, but yank all visas of any of those nationals who currently reside in the U.S. and send them home to enjoy the advantages now offered on nightly video displays in their own native countries.

The national security team of this administration—gifts from the failed Obama administration that is responsible for much of the current Middle East mess— remains confused and inept.

And that’s a charitable assessment. It of course starts at the top. Joe Biden is neither physically nor cognitively up to the task of Commander in Chief in a crisis. He has more or less disappeared other than offering an occasionally brief appearance where he mumbles about standing with Israel and then vanishes again.

Secretary of State Anthony Blinken recently deleted a tweet calling for an immediate cease-fire–music to the ears of Hamas and Iran.

Why? Does he believe it is moral to allow Hamas to murder 900 Jews, beat their chests about such savagery, and then head home with human trophies to be tortured and executed without a response?

Blinken noted that he and the Turkish foreign minister had talks that led to such an absurd statement.

And what about Turkey, the erstwhile Obama key to the Middle East?

Its intrusive armed drone was shot down recently in Syria by the US Air Force and remains an unapologetic pro-Hamas partisan.

And whether long-term it can remain in NATO—long opposing Sweden’s entry, chronic overflights of the Greek islands in the Aegean, supplier of weapons to Russia, threatening to send missiles into Athens, a security risk anytime it receives US weapons—is a real concern, given it has the largest, non-US army in NATO and hosts a nuclear-armed U.S. base.

Blinken also blasted critics who deplored his outreach to Iran, disparaging them as misinforming and misinformed.

He is petulant because he knows that the Iranian expectation of an upcoming $6 billion US-driven cash transfer (another sick idea to buy back hostages from a murderous Tehran) gives them in the here and now fungible opportunities to send more cash and arms into the hands of anti-Israeli terrorists.

As far as Iran’s role in the Hamas orgy of killing, Blinken also declared that there is no evidence of “anything that shows us that Iran was directly involved in this attack, in planning it or in carrying it out.”

No one but you, Secretary Blinken, believes that.

When one remembers Blinken’s Palestinian Affairs office in the State Department and its even worse ceasefire tweet, which, like Blinken’s, disappeared without comment, the appointment of the Iranian megaphone Robert Malley (currently under investigation by the FBI) as our point man on the bankrupt Iran Deal, and Blinken’s recent brag about all the hundreds of millions of dollars we have sent to the Palestinians, the picture is one of partisan incompetence.

That pattern goes all the way back to the 2021 Chinese humiliation in Anchorage of both Blinken and Jake Sullivan.

Or perhaps both were suspect even earlier when we recall it was campaign honcho Blinken who on the eve of the 2020 election apparently thought up the nasty idea of calling on ex-interim CIA director Mike Morell to round up 51 intelligence “authorities” to lie to the American people that the Hunter Biden laptop under FBI wraps was somehow a product of “Russian disinformation” and not authentic (a claim even Hunter Biden could not make).

That gambit was designed to fuel Biden in the upcoming debate and indeed warp the election itself. And it did.

National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has a similar politicized record, as one of the principles seeding the 2016 Clinton-campaign lie that a mythical Trump server was communicating with the Russians and thus proof of “Russian collusion”.

Sullivan, remember, just a week before the Hamas slaughter assured us that “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.”

So Hamas kills, while we tweet and delete….

The biggest mistake we could make as America First patriots is to assume the Biden-Harris regime is failing. By our standards, they are failing miserably. But if their goal is the destruction of our nation, which I believe it is, then their track-record so far is stellar.

Being a Democrat with bad policies is common. But when EVERYTHING an administration does takes us in the wrong direction, we have to question their motives. I believe they are working on behalf of the globalist elite cabal to bring for the “Liberal World Order.” To do that, they need the United States to drop to the level of the rest of the world… or disappear completely. With that said, here’s the article by Victor Davis Hanson:

• Why is French President Emmanuel Macron cozying up to China while trashing his oldest ally, the United States?
• Why is there suddenly talk of discarding the dollar as the global currency?
• Why are Japan and India shrugging that they cannot follow the United States’ lead in boycotting Russian oil?
• Why is the president of Brazil traveling to China to pursue what he calls a “beautiful relationship”?
• Why is Israel suddenly facing attacks from its enemies in all directions?
• What happened to Turkey? Why is it threatening fellow NATO member Greece? Is it still a NATO ally, a mere neutral, or a de facto enemy?
• Why are there suddenly nonstop Chinese threats toward Taiwan?
• Why did Saudi Arabia conclude a new pact with Iran, its former archenemy?
• Why was Egypt secretly planning to send rockets to Russia to be used in Ukraine, according to leaked Pentagon papers?
• Since when did the Russians talk nonstop about the potential use of a tactical nuclear weapon?
• Why is Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador bragging that millions of Mexicans have entered the United States, most of them illegally? And why is he interfering in U.S. elections by urging his expatriates to vote for Democrats?
• Why and how, in just two years, have confused and often incoherent President Joe Biden and his team created such global chaos?

Let us answer by listing 10 ways by which America lost all deterrence:

1) Biden abruptly pulled all U.S. troops from Afghanistan. He left behind to the Taliban hundreds of Americans and thousands of pro-American Afghans. Biden abandoned billions of dollars in U.S. equipment, the largest air base in central Asia—recently retrofitted at a cost of $300 million—and a $1 billion embassy. Our government called such a debacle a success. The world disagreed and saw only humiliation.

2) The Biden administration allowed a Chinese high-altitude spy balloon to traverse the continental United States, spying on key American military installations. The Chinese were defiant when caught and offered no apologies. In response, the Pentagon and the administration simply lied about the extent that China had surveilled top-secret sites.

3) In March 2021, at an Anchorage, Alaska mini-summit, Chinese diplomats unleashed a relentless barrage at their stunned and mostly silent American counterparts. They lectured the timid Biden administration diplomats about American toxicity and hypocrisy. And they have defiantly refused to explain why and how their virology lab birthed the COVID-19 virus that has killed tens of millions worldwide.

4) In June 2021, in response to Russian cyber-attacks against the United States, Biden meekly asked Russian President Vladimir Putin to at least make off-limits certain critical American infrastructure.

5) When asked what he would do if Russia invaded Ukraine, Biden replied that the reaction would depend on whether the Russians conducted a “minor incursion.”

6) Between 2021 and 2022, Biden serially insulted and bragged that he would not meet Muhammad bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, and one of our oldest and most valuable allies in the Middle East.

7) For much of 2021, the Biden administration made it known that it was eager and ready to offer concessions to re-enter the dangerous Iran nuclear deal—at a time when Iran has joined China and Russia in a new geostrategic partnership.

8) Almost immediately upon inauguration, the administration moved the United States away from Israel, restored financial aid to radical Palestinians, and both publicly and privately alienated the current Netanyahu government.

9) In serial fashion, Biden stopped all construction on the border wall and opened the border. During the 2019 Democratic presidential primary, Biden made it known that illegal aliens were welcome to enter the United States—some 6-7 million did. He reinstated “catch and release.” And he did nothing about the Mexican cartel importation of fentanyl that has recently killed over 100,000 Americans per year.

10) In the last two years, the Pentagon has embarked on a woke agenda. The army is short by 15,000 in its annual recruitment quota. The defense budget has not kept up with inflation. One of the greatest intelligence leaks in U.S. history just occurred from the Pentagon.

The Pentagon refused to admit culpability and misled the country about Afghanistan and the Chinese spy balloon flight. The current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff called his Chinese communist counterpart and head of the People’s Liberation Army to advise him that the U.S. military would warn the Chinese if it determined an order from its commander-in-chief, former President Donald Trump, was inappropriate.

This list of these self-inflicted disasters could be easily expanded.

But the examples explain well enough why our emboldened enemies do not fear us, our triangulating allies judge us unreliable, and calculating neutrals assume America is in descent and too dangerous to join.

Yet without America, the result is a new Chinese order in which, to quote the historian Thucydides, “The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.