The night we have waited 4 long years for has finally arrived!!
Anyone ready to be completely vindicated in their true American Values and witness the greatest liberal meltdowns in history?! π₯³π₯³
2 live feeds are down below if you wish to keep up to the minute. I trust them fully.
I'll be going back and forth between here and Twitter with other conservative reporters, so there will be a lot of news coming in!
Now, LET'S GO DEFEAT OUR ENEMIES!!!!
Everybody is being implored to get out and vote. We also hear appeals that this year’s November 5 election is the most important election in America’s history. Let us be clear why that statement is true and why every citizen needs to vote.
People forget that America is matchless in all human history. Prior to the birth of America with its founding documents -- the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution -- it was the state that determined the subjects’ rights. And those rights could change at the whim of whoever wielded government power. The world lived in shades of darkness, until the light came through America.
There were times and places in human history when there were nation states of cultural achievement, such as in Periclean Athens, in the Florence of the Medicis, and in England of Elizabeth and Shakespeare. But none were founded the way America was. The United States is the only country in the entire history of mankind that was specifically founded on ideas and principles, rather than blood lineage, language, common culture, and the spoils of war and conquest.
And those founding ideas came out of the Bible and reformed Christianity, making America the first country that codified in its governing documents the belief that all people are created equal in value and that they have God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Because these rights are sacred and unalienable, they cannot be infringed upon or taken away by the state.
When this is fully grasped, it becomes more understandable why the Democrat Party removed reference to ‘God’ from their party platform some twelve years ago when Obama was running for a second term. Removing God from the party platform erases the precept that citizens and the unborn have God-given rights and it shifts the locus of legitimacy back to the governing elites and away from the people.
In addition to an appreciation of the rights and freedoms that God intended for the American people, the Founding Fathers -- who were almost all professing Christians -- understood that man’s fallen nature was intractable and would lead to political corruption. Thus, they recognized the need for government to have extensive checks and balances to mitigate abuse of power. This too, was another significant contribution by America to countries worldwide seeking solutions to inevitable corruption in government.
George Washington was prescient about how corruption could undermine the constitutional order of America, particularly when political parties are involved. He specifically addressed this in his 1796 Farewell Address, when he said:
However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.
Many feel that the November 5 election should rightly be a referendum on corruption and misuse of power, specifically the Biden-Harris abuse of power that may be unparalleled in America’s long history. Consider:
The Democrat party that claims they are the party defending democracy has repeatedly shown an affinity for violence and riots. Two-term Democrat president Barack Obama dealt with some seven major confrontations based on race, class, and partisanship -- from violence following the death Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida in 2012 to riots that were triggered by alleged police treatment of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland in April 2015.
The Democrats’ political use of violence did not end with Trump’s election in 2016. Democrat operatives torched various parts of Washington, D.C. during the inauguration in January 2017. And in 2020 during the initial stages of Covid-19, triggered by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Democrat activists together with their allies in BLM and Antifa, inflicted several billion dollars of property damage and destruction on numerous major cities in America.
In this environment of fear, Democrat activists and lawyers exploited the opportunity to change many of the swing states’ voting rules, protocols, and procedures, expanding absentee voting, allowing for the use ballot drop boxes and extending the deadlines for counting ballots -- all directed at rigging the vote.
We will surely face voting irregularities in this year’s national election, but America is a remarkable and unique country in which the people now better understand that they are sovereign and must change the course of their nation. It may be that God allowed all the chaos of the last four years to happen to wake up and educate the American people. Thus, as people became informed, they cannot unsee and have no excuse for sitting out this election.
The day has arrived. It’s Election Day, and slavery or independence is on the ballot. It’s not like 2020, when Joe Biden had a decisive edge over Donald Trump in the polls. Kamala Harris doesn’t have that—in fact, she’s underwater with core Democratic voter groups. Why is it so close? That’s the thing about Trump: he animates their base as much as he does ours. No matter what, the Democrats would get someone garnering at least 45 percent of the vote. Yet, the former president enters Election Day in his best polling position ever.
Trump is on the precipice of the most remarkable political comeback of all time. The most investigated man has beaten assassins, the FBI, unhinged Democrats, the intelligence community, and the liberal media. He’s Teflon Don. Even with the coordinated and sustained assault on Trump through the courts, he has prevailed. Democrats thought his retaking of the GOP nomination would be the death knell for the GOP, which is about to retake the Senate, could expand its majority in the House, and reclaim the presidency. They thought wrong, as their insular world and voter base no longer includes ordinary working people.
Kamala Harris is projected to be the worst-performing Democrat among union and working-class voters ever. Hispanics aren’t high on her, with key Muslim communities either refusing to vote for her, backing a third-party candidate, or outright voting for Trump. She’s not looking good in Wisconsin, but Pennsylvania is the ballgame, where she’s spent her last full day. Is North Carolina no longer in play for Kamala’s camp?
The woman had months to engage in a sustained media campaign to define herself and her agenda for the country. She failed miserably doing that since she’s too stupid to think on her feet or articulate basic positions on policy. It’s a word salad buffet, and we know why she couldn’t outline a Kamala agenda. It’s already etched in stone by someone named Joe Biden.
One of the things that gets lost is the states in play were never within reach under the old guard. We’re talking about Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania all being gettable. That wasn’t the case with Bush, Romney, or McCain. With Trump, thanks to his neo-populist infusion into the Republican Party, it is—a healthy dose of voter anger over the elites and the political class also didn’t hurt.
I admit that I was not enthused at the outset of this race. But with time and increasingly unhinged antics from the Democratic Party, along with the lawfare, I’m jacked to vote for Trump for a third time. It’s about sticking it to Democrats, the liberal media, the snotty coastal elites, and the folks who think their input should be valued more because they have a college degree in "whining like a little b****" and shop at Whole Foods. It’s about destroying the fake news media establishment, which will splinter if Trump wins again.
Who will carry us over the top? Democrats are banking on women. A significant cohort that despises Trump but will vote for him over the torpid economy that Biden-Harris has thrust upon us. It’s the latest iteration of the shy Trump voter. Many pollsters and liberal media types are likely going to miss the corollary among these voters’ positions. They may hate the former president but know times were better under him, and Kamala offers nothing but lowering one’s IQ.
If the Trump vote is underestimated again, it’s a landslide for the former president. At the same time, if we’re off slightly about Kamala, she wins. The pandemic is over, mail-in ballots aren’t as prevalent, and their return rate is down among Democratic voters. The left can’t engage in the shenanigans of the last cycle.
The only poll that matters is the one where the eventual winner is declared. Vote now. Vote like your life depends on it. The battle is here. Be vigilant and report silliness at your local polling stations.
We can’t let the Democrats attempt to steal this election.
Let's Make America Great Again. Let's retake the Senate and hold the House. A united government under Republican rule is upon us.
Vote!
For more than two years we have been saying to keep an eye on Moldova in the background. Yesterday Moldova held their national election, and while the actual number of people living in Moldova voted for the anti-war position, once the overseas ballots were added the results changed. The nationalists became the minority and the pro-war/pro-EU globalists declared victory.
This may seem like a relatively ‘over there’ and small issue. However, the people who control Joe Biden, the U.S. State Dept and the CIA have been positioning themselves in/around Moldova for several years now. Watch out for Moldova to become the spark that leads to escalated conflict with Russia.
Moldova has a significant population of pro-Russia citizens in the east, which makes the internal domestic dynamic a little strenuous to manage. It is very similar to Ukraine in that regard. It is much smaller than Ukraine, but similar inside the national political dynamic. Additionally, the geopolitical dynamic that is unfolding with the use of Moldova is identical to how the U.S/NATO exploited Ukraine.
A lot depends on what happens tomorrow in the U.S. election. This aspect cannot be overstated. However, there is now a high degree of confidence, if the people behind Kamala Harris are able to pull off a manipulated USA election, Moldova will immediately become the fulcrum for expanded direct conflict between the “west”, led by the USA, and Russia.
With the globalists and pro-war EU institutions how cemented into the national politics of Moldova, all of the elements for an unstable powder keg are in place. Just like Ukraine, Vladimir Putin will not permit the open use of geographical proximity to provoke conflict directly on Russia’s border. What Ukraine was, Moldova now is.
ASSOCIATED PRESS – CHISINAU, Moldova (AP) — Moldova’s pro-Western President Maia Sandu has won a second term in a pivotal presidential runoff against a Russia-friendly opponent, in a race that was overshadowed by claims of Russian interference, voter fraud, and intimidation in the European Union candidate country.
With nearly 99% of votes counted in the second round of the presidential election held Sunday, Sandu had 55% of the vote, according to the Central Electoral Commission, or CEC, compared to 45% for Alexandr Stoianoglo, a former prosecutor general who was backed by the pro-Russia Party of Socialists.
The result will be a major relief for the pro-Western government, which strongly backed Sandu’s candidacy, and her push for closer Western ties on Moldova’s path toward the EU.
[…] When polls closed locally at 9 p.m. (1900 GMT), turnout stood at more than 1.68 million people — about 54% of eligible voters, according to the CEC. Moldova’s large diaspora, which cast ballots in record numbers of more than 325,000 voted, heavily in favor of Sandu in the runoff. (read more)
It was the Moldovan ex-pat community, living outside Moldova, that overwhelmingly decided the fate of this small nation that borders Russia.
Oddly, and I have made ancillary mention to this in the past, there is an absolutely massive population of ex-pat Moldovans living in/around Jackson Hole Wyoming. Years ago I started noticing it, but I had no real context to understand why there was such a dense population of people from a relatively obscure country all in one place. We all know who else lives in Jackson Hole, Wyoming: Dick and Liz Cheney.
The people living in Moldova are majority aligned with Russia. However, the people voting in the election from outside Moldova changed the dynamic of the election. This reality creates a major source of angst for Russia and Vladimir Putin. This dynamic also creates the point on the stick the EU/USA and CIA will use to poke the bear.
Watch closely.
War is more imminent today than it was yesterday.
The Trump campaign released a video on Monday that perfectly illustrated Kamala Harris' biggest liability heading into election day: Her rampant, often comical inauthenticity.
How did they do it? They took one segment from three different speeches given by Harris in the last few weeks and then overlayed them. The result was almost disturbing. You can hear Harris not only repeat the words verbatim, with the same tone and inflections, but her head and hand movements are even choreographed. She even rehearsed leaning into the mic.
This is mind-blowing stuff.
HARRIS: Are you ready to make your voices heard? Do we believe in freedom? Do we believe in opportunity? Do we believe in the promise of America? And are we ready to fight for it? And when we fight, we win!
As someone who once worked in the video and audio editing space, it's shocking that the above clip is even audible. You'd expect the words to be the same given they are scripted, but the timing being exactly the same to the point where everything is perfectly understandable is pretty crazy. This isn't just a politician delivering a canned speech. This is an actress who has clearly spent a lot of time being coached on every detail of what she's going to say.
If it were just the words coming out of her mouth, it'd be one thing, but she took the time to script leaning into the mic and raising her arms at different points. That's a level of inauthenticity rarely seen, even in the political space. It's as if Harris were a robot, manufactured in a lab somewhere with everything she does downloaded into her brain by a third party.
Harris on Colbert May Be Her Most Inauthentic, Cringe Interview Ever, With One Especially Bad Moment
What does that say about how she'll govern? That's the big question, right? This is a woman who presents as someone who has never had an original thought in her life. Every public appearance makes her appear more vapid and empty than the last. Could you imagine her having to think on her feet in some of the tense situations presidents are put in? Certainly, she could never be trusted to stand up to special interests. They'd just tell her what to do and say, and she'd go out there and do it like Ron Burgundy reading a teleprompter.
It continues to astonish me that a large portion of Americans are even considering signing up for four years of this. Do they not value their sanity? I know Joe Biden being president has numbed some people to the effects of having an empty vessel in the office, but that doesn't have to be the choice.
On October 26, Israel struck air-defense sites and missile facilities in Iran. Under pressure from the United States, Israel limited its retaliation. Apparently seeking deescalation, the Biden-Harris administration has tried to prevent Israel from achieving a decisive victory or reestablishing deterrence since the start of this latest Middle East war.
Of course, such a policy can only lead to further escalation. Israel is sure to keep pressing the war against Iran’s proxies, which are merely tentacles of the Iranian regime itself. And Iran, having chosen this moment to get into a war with Israel, will not back down until Israel inflicts a punishment so painful that the mullahs in Tehran dare not risk another. Indeed, Iran has already signaled that it will retaliate with a “definitive and painful” response, perhaps in the coming days. Capitalizing on America’s (and Israel’s) inexplicable failure to attribute Iranian proxy attacks directly to it, Iran will likely make greater use of its militias in Iraq, thereby goading Israel into attacking Iraq while catching the few remaining U.S. troops there in a cross-fire.
Indeed, Iran’s coming escalation may have dire consequences for the United States. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei recently said that Iran must obtain the means of greater power and should not “refrain from obtaining means that might trigger the sensitivities of the [great] powers.” A leading Iranian parliamentarian, Alaeddin Boroujerdi, was more explicit, warning that the confrontation with Israel could make it necessary to withdraw from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) altogether.
It is not a coincidence that Iran chose this moment to get embroiled in a war with Israel. Iran has reached the threshold of nuclear breakout. Whenever it makes the decision to start making nuclear warheads, Iran is now just weeks away from being able to test a device. Compliance with International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspections is now the only thing standing between it and nuclear weapons.
In response to sabotage at its uranium enrichment facility at Natanz in 2021, Iran began enriching uranium to 60 percent enrichment, a level that has no plausible civilian justification. As of August 2024, Iran had 363.1 pounds of 60 percent enriched uranium. That’s enough to make at least a dozen warheads once further enriched to 90 percent enrichment, the threshold for “weapons-grade” uranium. Iran surely has secret nuclear facilities, but in order to take the final step to nuclear breakout, it will almost certainly need to use the massive facilities currently subject to IAEA inspections.
Hence the critical importance of Iran’s continued compliance with the NPT. A nuclear-armed Iran would be as grave a threat to the United States as to Israel. Indeed, because it could entail the wholesale collapse of the nuclear nonproliferation regime, an Iranian decision to abandon the NPT would threaten civilization itself. Given the stakes, Iran’s abandoning the NPT will almost certainly force the U.S. to either accept a nuclear-armed Iran or do whatever is necessary to prevent it.
To understand why, let’s go back to the North Korea nuclear crisis of 1994.
After North Korea blocked IAEA inspections and announced its intention to withdraw from the NPT, President Bill Clinton came close to bombing the nuclear complex at Yongbyon. Unfortunately for the world to come, Clinton blinked, and we were soon forced to accept the fact of a nuclear-armed North Korea. The cruel dictatorship in Pyongyang has held the world hostage ever since, extorting enough food and fuel to stay in power by rattling the nuclear saber whenever the fancy strikes, as happened again just last week.
North Korea’s demonstration of how even the most depraved regime on Earth can attain nuclear weapons had important lessons for the mullahs in Tehran. First, it revealed something that nobody knew before: The Americans were not necessarily prepared to use force to defend the nonproliferation regime. Second, the “plutonium pathway” that North Korea had chosen was cheap and easy but had a single-point-of-failure that made it needlessly risky: It relied on an exposed nuclear reactor that could be destroyed by a single airstrike, as Saddam learned when Israel bombed the Osirak reactor in 1981.
Furthermore, that single-point-of-failure also made for an early “red line.” North Korea’s hard-water reactor produced trivial amounts of electricity by power-plant standards; its obvious purpose was military. Once North Korea started discharging the reactor pool at Yongbyon, bombing it was a “now or never” decision for Clinton even though North Korea was still years away at the earliest from actually having a nuclear warhead. That marked the last point in time at which the location of North Korea’s fissile material could be known with certainty.
The mullahs had always been interested in nuclear weapons. Nukes could ensure the survival and success of the Islamic Revolution — and help it put an end to Israel, if only by scaring Jews into leaving the Holy Land altogether. After the U.S. in effect gave a green light to North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, the mullahs realized that they, too, could get nuclear weapons if they played their cards right.
Unlike North Korea, however, they decided to focus on the more ambitious “uranium pathway.” This would be a far more expensive, sophisticated, and laborious undertaking. But it had several advantages. The uranium pathway doesn’t have a vulnerable single-point-of-failure. Rather than extracting weapons-grade plutonium from the spent fuel rods of a hard-water reactor, the uranium pathway for nuclear weapons relies on “centrifuge cascades” designed to enrich uranium to weapons-grade incrementally without having to go through a reactor at all. The centrifuge cascades can be dispersed and buried deep underground. And unlike weapons-grade plutonium (which is extremely radioactive), highly enriched uranium (HEU) can be detected by Geiger counters but is still safe to handle with bare hands, making transport and storage much easier.
Moreover, the incremental nature of the uranium pathway has no early Rubicon-style red line like the plutonium pathway does. The facilities involved in the uranium pathway for producing HEU are the same as those needed to produce “low enriched uranium” (or LEU) for use in commercial light-water reactors, the main difference being that the centrifuges have to run much longer. That meant that the mullahs could nest a weapons program within a civilian commercial program, exploiting perhaps the most significant loophole in the NPT, which is that dual-use facilities (those that have both military and civilian uses) are permissible as long as there is no “diversion” of nuclear material for weapons use. The year after the North Korea nuclear crisis, Iran signed an agreement with Russia to build a commercial light-water reactor at Bushehr.
It is easier to develop nuclear weapons on the periphery of a large-scale “civilian” nuclear program based on uranium enrichment than to develop an entire plutonium pathway in secret. All one has to do is impose a few key restrictions on IAEA inspections.
Sure enough, as the latest IAEA report shows, Iran has failed to account for the presence of enriched uranium detected at several undeclared locations, has failed to be fully transparent with respect to centrifuge manufacturing, and has secretly conducted high-explosives testing consistent with warhead design. As a result, the IAEA is not “in a position to provide assurance that Iran’s nuclear programme is exclusively peaceful.”
Based on recent IAEA reports, one nuclear watchdog group concludes that Iran has completed all the steps needed for full nuclear weapons breakout and — whenever it makes the decision to go nuclear — could produce up to nine nuclear warheads in a month, and 15 in five months. Moreover, it was discovered last year that Iran has built a new nuclear facility under a mountain near Natanz that is so deep underground that it might be beyond the reach of conventional weapons. With this facility, it will be able to make nuclear warheads even faster.
Whatever the scope of Iran’s secret nuclear activities, it almost certainly has not been producing nuclear weapons. Rather, what Iran has been trying to do in secret is get ready to produce nuclear weapons. In order to engage in serial production of nuclear weapons, Iran will need the far-flung facilities that it has developed under the guise of a civilian program. All it has to do is to stop cooperating with the IAEA and withdraw from the NPT (whether formally or de facto) so that it can pull a veil of secrecy over the entire program.
From that point forward, we will have to assume that Iran is a nuclear weapon state. North Korea didn’t conduct its first test of a nuclear device until 2006, but by then the U.S. had long since been forced to accept the high probability that it was a nuclear weapons state.
Iran’s withdrawal from the NPT will result in a cascade of disastrous consequences. Saudi Arabia has said that if Iran gets the bomb, it will get one, too. Turkey and Egypt are then likely to join the club. And consider how desperate Israel’s position will become. It will have to assume not just that any ballistic or cruise missile launched from Iran could be nuclear-tipped, justifying the use of its own nuclear deterrent, but that Iran could smuggle a nuclear device into Tel Aviv with plausible deniability that it had done so.
The “July War” of 2006 between Israel and Lebanon’s Hezbollah left Iran’s most powerful proxy with little to show for its effort other than several thousand dead fighters. After that, Hassan Nasrallah, the recently departed leader of Hezbollah, loudly professed solidarity with the Palestinians every time a war between them and Israel erupted, but largely kept his powder dry. Iran had apparently decided to husband Hezbollah for use at the right time and focus on building up its arsenal of rockets in the meantime. Within a few years, Hezbollah had ten times as many rockets as it had before the July War — more than most NATO countries.
But for what purpose exactly did Iran mean to use Hezbollah?
Iran’s ultimate goal is the survival and expansion of the Islamic Revolution of Iran, particularly across the Arab heartland. Arabs have long been hostile towards encroaching Persians, but the mullahs hit on a galvanizing cause that might help them unify the Arab world: the destruction of Israel. Terrorizing Jews into abandoning Israel became a defining commitment of the regime, something it hopes to accomplish through what one might call “missile terrorism.”
Iranian missile terrorism is very different from your garden-variety Arab terrorism. Palestinian terrorists, for example, are scary but not that scary. True enough, Palestinian suicide bombers killed thousands of Jews on buses, in restaurants, and at wedding venues between 2001 and 2003. But Israel’s 2002 “Defensive Shield” operation in the West Bank, along with beefed-up security and a “separation wall” in the West Bank, greatly reduced that threat. Car-ramming and marketplace knifings are terrifying. But even in the most dangerous part of Israel, pedestrians are a lot safer than in, say, Baltimore. Even Hamas’ unspeakable crime of Oct. 7, 2023, has only made Israelis more determined than ever to prevail; other than that, all Hamas has to show for its “Al Aqsa storm” is the destruction of Gaza.
As practiced by Iran and its proxies, on the other hand, missile terrorism is an entirely different kind of threat, as the July War itself had shown. The 100+ rockets that Hezbollah fired at northern Israel every day for a month caused few casualties. But they scared a third of Israel’s population into bomb shelters for weeks. Many Israelis started leaving for the United States, in many cases indefinitely.
Hence, missile terrorism poses a threat to the existence of Israel that is far beyond the potential casualty figures: A state that cannot make its people feel safe going about their daily lives, that can’t even keep its airports open because of terrorism, is in danger of failing. Whereas Palestinian terrorism targets Jews for the sheer satisfaction of murdering them, Iranian terrorism targets Israelis’ faith in the state of Israel. Iran has realized what too many Israeli leaders have not: that missile terrorism is an existential threat. Missile defenses such as Iron Dome have lulled too many Israelis into thinking that the threat is manageable. It isn’t.
So here is the question. After holding back from helping Hamas in its confrontations with Israel for nearly 20 years, why did Iran decide to join the fight this time? Perhaps Iran sensed a unique opportunity to combine the missile terrorism of all its proxies and the mayhem that antisemites and wannabe terrorists could cause in Western cities and universities to deliver a fatal blow to the morale of Israel.
Maybe. But alas, Iran’s decision to fight Israel now was likely part of a much more dangerous plan.
Given the stage that Iran’s nuclear weapons program has reached, the timing of Hezbollah’s attack — a day after Oct. 7, 2023 — is just too perfect to have been a coincidence.
That’s not to say that Iran or Hezbollah knew in advance of Hamas’s plan to attack on Oct. 7. Just as Israel would be foolish to share precise attack plans with the leak-prone Americans, Hamas would risk a leak by sharing its plan with the Iranian regime and Hezbollah, which are both infested with moles.
But the IDF discovered evidence in Yahya Sinwar’s final hiding place that Hamas had tried to convince Iran to join the attack for more than a year before Oct. 7, and that Iran demurred. So we know that Iran had some knowledge of Hamas’s intentions — as, in all likelihood, did Israeli intelligence, which probably greeted Hamas’s evergreen dreams of genocide with a fateful yawn.
Given the dispatch with which Hezbollah joined the fight after Hamas’s attack, it seems very unlikely that it acted on impulse. More likely Iran and Hezbollah had carefully considered the implications of Hamas’ plans and had decided that, under the right circumstances, they were ready for war with Israel. Whether Iran gave a green light or just tacit assent is not particularly important. The mullahs had plenty of time — years in fact — to think through the chain of events that might result from a major Hamas attack and how they could turn all those highly expendable Palestinian civilians to their advantage.
Iran appears to have decided sometime in 2023 that should Hamas indeed execute a significant attack against Israel, it would quickly open up the other fronts available to it, starting with its militias — Hezbollah operating from Lebanon and Syria, the Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen.
Then, depending on Israel’s response to the militias’ missile terrorism campaign, Iran would have in reserve several more cards that it had spent decades patiently preparing. Israeli operations, overt and covert, against Iranian military assets across the region had become increasingly bold. Should Israel cross the red line of overtly violating Iranian sovereignty — for example by killing an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) general in an Iranian consulate, as happened on April 1 of this year — Iran was prepared to retaliate directly against Israel by launching a wave of ballistic and cruise missile attacks.
Any such move would entail high risk but also a potentially huge payoff. The best that could happen was that the Biden-Harris administration’s policy of pulling Israel back from reestablishing deterrence would continue even after an Iranian attack. (This gamble, too, was destined to pay off: The hardliners in Tehran could hardly believe their luck when President Biden told Israel to “take the win” and forebear to retaliate against Iran for launching hundreds of ballistic and cruise missiles directly at Israeli cities in April. U.S. missile defense for Israel was now serving to protect Iran from the consequences of its aggression.) The U.S. might even force Israel to accept a “new normal” of persistent missile terrorism, as France and other U.S. allies would like it to do, further eroding Israeli morale.
The worst that could happen would be a devastating Israeli counterstrike against military, energy, and nuclear infrastructure (which may well happen in the next round of escalation). But even in that case, Iranian planners likely assessed that there was only so much pain that the tiny state of Israel could inflict on Iran. Israel has a small navy and no aircraft carriers. Its submarine force is part of a credible nuclear deterrent, but of limited benefit against Iran otherwise; sea-launched cruise missiles carry relatively small conventional payloads. Israel’s mighty air force was definitely a force to be contended with, having humbled the region’s most powerful armies before, but it had no heavy bombers.
In short, the mullahs likely thought, Israel is not the United States. It could inflict enormous pain on Iran, but it likely could not deliver a fatal blow to the state itself as the Americans did to Iraq in a single night of shock and awe.
Israel’s recent destruction of all four Russian-made S-300 antiaircraft batters — the only truly capable air defenses that Iran possessed — has made much of Iran’s nuclear and other critical infrastructure vulnerable to another Israeli strike, which is likely to increase Israel’s deterrence. But much of that infrastructure is buried deep underground, beyond the reach of even the most powerful conventional bunker-busters. And given America’s foolish restraint of Israel, the mullahs are reasonably certain that they can survive even a fierce Israeli counterattack.
They still have a nuclear option, as it were, and the Palestinians may have given them the perfect cover to use it. The North Korea nuclear crisis showed that an unprovoked decision to withdraw from the NPT would force the U.S. to at least consider using force to destroy a rogue nuclear program. Iran could risk provoking an Israeli attack, but not an American one.
On the other hand, a large-scale Israeli attack on Iran was sure to be condemned by many governments around the world, including a number on the Board of Governors of the IAEA. Withdrawing from the NPT in response to an Israeli attack, with the justification that it was being attacked by a nuclear power and needed nuclear weapons of its own, would be seen by many governments as an understandable response. Opposition from allies could make America hesitate.
Moreover the risk of such a move could be significantly mitigated, and here a page from the North Korea playbook might work brilliantly. The NPT allows states to withdraw with 90 days’ notice. When North Korea withdrew from the NPT in 1993, it waited to see what America’s reaction would be. When it seemed that Clinton might be prepared to use force, North Korea went down to the wire and “suspended” its withdrawal from the NPT a few days before the 90 days were up. North Korea then bluffed its way to nuclear weapons by threatening to unleash war on the Korean peninsula, a real bluff considering North Korea’s dictatorship could not have survived three days of such a war.
We should expect similar gamesmanship from Iran. We are at “the River” in Texas Hold’em. All the community cards have been revealed. Iran has a weaker hand than its enemies but is willing to risk far more. Israel is keeping its cards close to the vest, American surveillance and leaks notwithstanding, but its one ace — nuclear weapons — is worthless now. America has by far the strongest hand in the round, but it has become risk-averse to the point of torpor: its increasingly besotted national security establishment equates deterrence with provocation, which is the strategic equivalent of unilateral disarmament. Iran likes its chances.
When Iran’s nuclear program was first discovered in 2003, the U.S. could have nipped it in the bud with a single airstrike. The argument against that move at the time (and against military action since) was that Iran would quickly reconstitute the program.
If that was the right answer, it was the wrong question. The military option on Iran’s nuclear program has to be assessed in terms of what Thomas Schelling would call a “tacit negotiation” between the U.S. and Iran: Properly conceived, the destruction of Iran’s nuclear program would be an important but incidental benefit of military force; the right goal — as with sanctions — would be to convince Iran to abandon the program.
And for that strategic objective, the target list is much broader and includes everything the regime needs to survive in the short term. That means oil refineries, power plants, ports, and military command-and-control, up to and including Iran’s Ministry of Defense and the offices of the Atomic Organization of Iran. Targeting any of those early on could have fatally undermined the internal influence of Iran’s nuclear hawks.
Solving problems before they become crises is always a good idea. In international relations, the time to stop a dangerous deterioration in the status quo is at the start, before it has run its course. That is the single most important lesson of the chain of events that led to World War II, and it is particularly true in the case of a rogue nuclear program. It would have been much easier to convince Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions when it had just one pilot facility that it half-expected somebody to bomb at any moment.
Now the nuclear weapons program is the crown jewel of the Islamic Revolution, to which the mullahs have subordinated all other priorities. As Henry Kissinger wrote, in order to avoid the use of force, it is sometimes necessary to threaten its use. Because we have not done that, we are now playing defense at the one-yard line and may have no other option.
Though its chances of success were never very high, there was a diplomatic option for dealing with Iran’s nuclear program — until President Barack Obama cashiered it in his Joint Comprehensive Plan Action (JCPOA), one of the most consequential examples of aiding and abetting terrorism in world history.
During the administration of George W. Bush, the U.S. was able to orchestrate a powerful Iran sanctions regime, backed by the U.N. Security Council with the support of Russia and China. That was a remarkable feat considering that Iran is an important client of Russia and China is more dependent on Iranian oil than any other major economy. Obama, to his credit, built on those sanctions, which soon brought Iran’s economy to the brink of collapse. In 2014, Iran’s currency lost more than half its value.
But just in the nick of time, Obama came to the mullahs’ rescue with the JCPOA, which dismantled the sanctions regime and provided Iran with a massive infusion of cash, just to secure Iran’s forbearance to go nuclear for a few more years. Needless to say, Iran took the money and ran.
Under President Donald Trump, the U.S. moved quickly to abandon the JCPOA. But alas, its benefits for Iran had already largely accrued. Obama’s cash infusion (which his dunce Secretary of State John Kerry had promised would not be used for terrorism) allowed Iran to lavishly fund the IRGC and Hezbollah. Even worse, the international sanctions regime could not be resurrected. The U.S. imposed “maximum pressure” through sanctions of its own, but while those exacted a heavy price, the reality was that Obama had fatally undermined the diplomatic option for stopping Iran’s nuclear program.
In the supposed interest of peace and stability, the U.S. has waited until its most virulent enemy is in a position to turn the world upside down. The moment that the mullahs have been waiting so patiently for, suffering through decades of sanctions and privations, is finally here. They have a nuclear weapon within their grasp. They need but seize it, knowing that the odds of America’s folding are in their favor, and overwhelmingly so, as long as Joe Biden or Kamala Harris is in power.
All Iran needs to do now is withdraw from the NPT, and it will be a brave new world.
