Joseph Belbruno Blog

  The Houthis Hit Israel Again The attack underscores that the Houthis are undeterred by American denunciations and pinprick responses to their assault on commercial shipping in the Red Sea region. The Houthis are allies of Iran, which provides them with weapons, including missiles. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the Houthis would pay a “heavy price” for the attack, citing Israeli retaliation in July on the Yemeni port of Hodeida after a Houthi drone attack on Tel Aviv. The U.S. should long ago have taken stronger action against the Houthis, as well as against Iran for supplying missiles to Russia and the Houthis. But President Biden fears escalation, and so Israel has to live with Houthi attacks while U.S. Navy commanders in the region play defense against Houthi assaults. The civilized world is losing its war with the Houthis and Iranians, and imagine what they will do when Iran gets nuclear weapons. The “heavy price” will be paid by the rest of the world. Advertiseme

  Crimea Shows What Ukraine Can Do Volodymyr Zelenskiy in Kyiv, Sept. 11.   Photo:  Olga Ivashchenko/Bloomberg News The success of Ukraine’s counterattacks into Crimea may be the strongest argument for allowing Kyiv to fire long-range weapons into Russia. What Ukraine has accomplished in the occupied peninsula proves that strikes into Russian territory could save many Ukrainian lives and put  Vladimir Putin  on his heels. The U.S., Britain and France currently provide Kyiv long-range weapons with the caveat that Ukrainian forces not fire them onto Russian soil. While Moscow considers Crimea—the first piece of Ukrainian territory it occupied in 2014—a part of Russia, the West correctly doesn’t. The fighting in Crimea proves that when given the tools and the freedom to use them, Ukraine can counterattack in a way that diminishes Mr. Putin’s war machine. Ukrainian forces wrought impressive damage on the peninsula with domestically produced weapons as early as April 2022. After Western all

  Le nostre incoerenti coalizioni Ascolta l'articolo 6 min i new Da condizione irrinunciabile a scelta libera. Non c’è più nessun obbligo in Italia di dare vita a coalizioni di governo (o ad alleanze di opposizione che aspirano a sostituire chi governa) in cui sia richiesto un accordo pregiudiziale e tassativo sulle scelte e sulla posizione internazionale del Paese. In passato non era così.   All’epoca della Guerra fredda era automaticamente escluso dalla possibilità di entrare in una maggioranza di governo chi non accettasse la collocazione internazionale dell’Italia, le sue alleanze. Con tutti i vincoli che ciò comportava.  Nemmeno dopo la fine della Guerra fredda, anche se ormai per ragioni diverse, e per un lungo periodo, furono possibili, nelle coalizioni di governo, dissensi radicali sulle questioni di politica estera. Soprattutto negli anni Novanta (fino all’11 Settembre 2001), l’accordo sulla posizione internazionale dell’Italia non c’era solo dentro le coalizioni, di centr

  Trump 'knock[s] the hell' out of California during fundraising jaunt to the state 09/13/2024 04:54 PM EDT RANCHO PALOS VERDES, California — Former President Donald Trump, speaking at his cliffside golf course overlooking the Pacific Ocean, lambasted California as a hellscape that Vice President Kamala Harris would inflict on the rest of the nation should she win the White House. It was the type of broadside against the state that many  expected Trump to let loose on the debate stage  against Harris earlier this week. Instead, the former president, in town for a fundraising jaunt, delivered the attack in person. The result was an incongruous mashup: Trump’s dystopian view of the nation’s most populous state set against one of its signature coastal vistas. “I’m here today in California with a very simple message for the American people,” Trump said at his Friday news conference. “We cannot allow comrade Kamala Harris and the communist left to do to America what they did to Cali

  What Undecided Voters Might Be Thinking Sept. 14, 2024 Credit... Daniel Ribar for The New York Times Opinion Columnist Since the populist surge that gave us Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump, politics in the Western world has polarized into a distinctive stalemate — an inconclusive struggle between a credentialed elite that keeps failing at basic tasks of governing and a populist rebellion that’s too chaotic and paranoid to be trusted with authority instead. The 2024 campaign in its waning days is a grim illustration of this deadlock. We just watched Kamala Harris, the avatar of the liberal establishment, smoothly out-debate Trump by goading him into expressing populism at its worst — grievance-obsessed, demagogic, nakedly unfit. But her smoothness was itself an evasion of the actual record of the administration in which she serves. Harris offered herself as the turn-the-page candidate while sidestepping almost every question about what the supposed adults in the room have wrought

  Essay | Ignore the Defeatists. America’s Strategy Is Working in Ukraine. As summer turns to fall, the news from Ukraine has been harrowing. Across the country, Russia has been attacking civilian targets, destroying residential buildings, schools and hospitals. Russia has been steadily degrading Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, ensuring that Ukrainians have a very hard winter ahead of them. In the next few months, fresh waves of Ukrainian refugees could well be pouring into Europe. Most ominously, Kyiv has not had the military momentum on its side since the summer of 2023. Back then, Ukraine’s counteroffensive petered out, yielding to some basic Russian advantages in manpower and materiel. Russia is currently lurching forward in Donbas in eastern Ukraine. It has discovered novel methods for waging this war, repurposing old stock into precision-guided “glide bombs.” The results on the ground have been devastating. Amid the distressing footage of damaged cities and murdered civilians, a

  How America Became a Republic of Distrust Illustrator: Matt Chinworth When trust collapses, what can hold a nation together? A shared history? A common language? The unavoidable interconnections that come from living in close proximity? Or nothing at all? This question weighs heavily on American life. It hangs over the biggest issues of the day: our fractured politics and government, the rise of artificial intelligence, the culture wars raging in businesses and schools, the existential threats of climate change and disease. True, we’ve been living through a crisis of trust for some time. Bright spots may appear here and there. (See: the military and small business.) And world-shaking events may have periodically scrambled our feelings about specific institutions; the earliest days of the Covid pandemic, for example, briefly boosted our belief in science and medicine. But widen the aperture, and the overall picture is unmistakable: The trend line goes in one direction — down. Trust in

  The U.S. Military Is Not Ready for the New Era of Warfare Sept. 13, 2024 Credit... Jared Nangle By  Raj M. Shah  and  Christopher M. Kirchhoff Mr. Shah is the managing partner of Shield Capital. Dr. Kirchhoff helped build the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit. Sign up for Your Places: Global Update.    All the latest news for any part of the world you select. Get it sent to your inbox. The First Matabele War, fought between 1893 and 1894, foretold the future. In its opening battle, roughly 700 soldiers, paramilitaries and African auxiliaries aligned with the British South Africa Company used five Maxim guns — the world’s first fully automatic weapon — to help repel over 5,000 Ndebele warriors, some 1,500 of whom were killed at a cost of only a handful of British soldiers. The brutal era of trench warfare that the Maxim gun ushered in didn’t become fully apparent until World War I. Yet initial accounts of its singular effectiveness correctly foretold the end of the cavalry, a critica