Important Takeaways:
- The Kremlin has issued yet more warnings following reports that the Biden administration could soon greenlight long-range attacks by Kiev forces on Russian territory using US-supplied arms.
- Both the UK and Canada are on board, we reported earlier, and British Prime Minister Ken Starmer is visiting Washington where he’s directly lobbying Biden to jump on board and grant Zelensky’s urgent request to lift all restrictions on Western weaponry.
- However, The New York Times suggests that saner minds are prevailing at this point. “President Biden’s deliberations with Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain about whether to allow Ukraine to attack Russia with long-range Western weapons were fresh evidence that the president remains deeply fearful of setting off a dangerous, wider conflict,” the publication writes.
- Let’s hope this is the case, given this is arguably the most dangerous moment and decision-point of the war to date.
- Russian Ambassador to the US Anatoly Antonov on Friday added to prior Kremlin warnings, telling Rossiya 24 channel that he fears American leadership and the people are under “illusion”.
- He said they seem to think that “if there is a conflict, it will not spread to the territory of the United States of America.”
- Antonov continued by stressing that Americans can’t hide from nuclear war if this unthinkable happens. “I am constantly trying to convey to them one thesis that the Americans will not be able to sit it out behind the waters of this ocean. This war will affect everyone, so we constantly say – do not play with this rhetoric,” Antonov stated according to state media translation.
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Important Takeaways:
- White House officials are signaling that President Joe Biden will not imminently move to block Nippon Steel’s bid to acquire U.S. Steel amid mounting concerns over the political and economic consequences of nixing the deal, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.
- The White House last week had been preparing to announce that the president would formally block the Japanese company’s proposed $14.9 billion acquisition of U.S. Steel on national security grounds.
- White House officials have now indicated that such a decision is unlikely in the short term and may not be made until after the 2024 presidential election
- White House spokeswoman Saloni Sharma disputed that there had been a change of plans, saying an announcement was never imminent and that the president remains committed to waiting for a recommendation from an interagency review board, as the law requires.
- The delay of any announcement, however, comes as investors, Pennsylvania Democrats and some members of the steelworkers’ union warned that the deal’s collapse could spark an economic calamity for Pennsylvania’s beleaguered steel belt.
- The United Steelworkers union, which endorsed Biden for reelection and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris in her presidential bid, has opposed the transaction from the outset.
- The proposed corporate acquisition has assumed outsize importance given its potential political impact on the 2024 election.
- Without Nippon Steel’s cash, U.S. Steel has warned that it might close some of its aging facilities in the Mon Valley.
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Important Takeaways:
- Blinken stated “I can tell you that as we go forward, we will do exactly what we have already done, which is we will adjust, we’ll adapt as necessary – including with regard to the means that are at Ukraine’s disposal.”
- The question of permission for Ukraine to use long-range weapons inside of Russia is also likely to be discussed at a meeting between British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and US President Joe Biden in Washington on Friday.
- So far, the US has only given Kiev permission to use its munitions to strike inside Russian territory if the targets are just across the border from the embattled eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.
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Important Takeaways:
- A federal judge in Georgia has temporarily blocked President Biden’s administration from implementing its plan to waive federal student loans for almost 30 million borrowers.
- The ruling is the latest in a long series of roadblocks to the administration’s campaign to wipe the slate clean on tens of billions of dollars in student debt via the Higher Education Act of 1965.
- Seven GOP-led states filed the lawsuit earlier this week challenging the Biden administration’s most recent student debt forgiveness plan, accusing the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) of taking steps to cancel loans beginning as early as this week.
- In the lawsuit filed Tuesday in a Brunswick, Georgia, federal court, attorneys general from Republican-led states — including Georgia and Missouri — took aim at a rule by the DOE proposed in April, which would provide for a waiver of federal student loan debts for approximately 27.6 million borrowers.
- The attorneys argue that the DOE does not have the authority to cancel the student loan debt. The Thursday order temporarily restrains the Biden administration from implementing the program.
- Missouri and Georgia are joined in the lawsuit by Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, North Dakota and Ohio.
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Important Takeaways:
- Israel’s military reported an airstrike hitting a weapons warehouse near a Hamas military site in Gaza City, as well as strikes that killed militants in central Gaza.
- Another round of airstrikes targeted more than 10 areas in southern Lebanon overnight, the Israel Defense Forces said Thursday. Those attacks were aimed at locations used by the Hezbollah militant group, the IDF said.
- U.S. President Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke Wednesday about efforts by the United States to support Israel “against all threats from Iran, including its proxy terrorist groups Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, to include ongoing defensive U.S. military deployments,” according to a White House statement.
- Negotiators from the United States, Egypt, Qatar and Israel are expected to meet in the coming days in Cairo to try to push forward the process of achieving a cease-fire that would include a halt in fighting and the release of hostages still held by Hamas.
- Netanyahu’s office said Wednesday that Israel insists on achieving all of its goals for the war, including ensuring that Hamas cannot pose a security threat to Israel.
- Hamas on Wednesday reiterated its core demands, which include Israel fully withdrawing from Gaza.
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Important Takeaways:
- Hamas representatives told various media outlets that the provisions U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken discussed with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that day were a “coup against” a previous Hamas-friendly proposal Israel rejected.
- Blinken was in Israel on Monday to discuss what he called the “last opportunity” for an end to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) ongoing self-defense operations in Gaza, Hamas’s stronghold territory used to launch the unprecedented October 7 attack on the Israeli homeland. Reaching a ceasefire agreement this week would grant President Joe Biden and his political party a major diplomatic victory to tout during the ongoing Democratic National Convention (DNC)
- Blinken did not specify why the current talks are the “last opportunity” for a deal. Pressed by reporters on Monday, he offered only that “intervening events come along that may make things even more difficult if not impossible” if the parties wait longer to hash out an agreement.
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Important Takeaways:
- The moral logic at work here is inexorable. What you see now at the DNC you will eventually see at the RNC.
- Did you hear about the free abortions and sterilizations on offer at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week? Incredibly, the news is real. Abortion-inducing drugs (mifepristone and Plan B) will be doled out from the back of a Planned Parenthood RV, along with vasectomies, just a few blocks from a convention that will embrace a radical abortion-until-birth policy that would have been unthinkable, even for Democrats, just a decade ago.
- Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance was savaged by the corporate press for repeatedly describing Democrats as “anti-family” in media appearances last week. Now, as if to prove Vance’s point, here they are with an abortion van at their convention and supporters marching through the streets dressed as abortion pills.
- What’s more difficult to understand and accept is how all of this is the inevitable consequence of a liberal worldview that the GOP has already accepted, which means what we’re seeing this week at the DNC we will eventually see at the RNC.
- I don’t just mean that the Trump campaign and the Republican Party have softened their opposition to abortion in the post-Dobbs era. It’s not merely that abortion was all but removed from the GOP platform and the party’s previous position in favor of federal abortion limits was abandoned. It’s that Trump and his Republican Party would like very much to stop talking about abortion altogether now, as if the matter is settled and we can move on to more important matters, like the border and inflation.
- The choice to take these issues off the table, or try to, is usually framed as pragmatic. We want a big tent, Democrats are radical, Republicans can present their side as reasonable.
- But it doesn’t work like that. There’s a reason the Democrats went from talking about how abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare” in the 1990s to celebrating it with free abortions from the back of an RV in 2024. Once you cede the principle of the thing, once you accept the premise that it’s justifiable to kill the unborn under certain circumstances, the list of allowable circumstances will continuously expand.
- The point here is not to sow discord on the right or decry a big tent strategy for the GOP, but merely to point out that when you violate the moral principles on which a social order is based, you don’t get to say when enough is enough. The slippery slope does not cease to be slippery when you think you’ve had enough. You will go all the way down it.
- Put another way, the time to say “no” was before the moral principle was violated, not after.
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Important Takeaways:
- Along with a surge of combat aircraft and warships, President Biden dispatched three of his top Mideast advisers, including CIA Director Bill Burns, to the region this week to try to delay Iranian and Hezbollah military retaliation against Israel, and to use that borrowed time to craft an offramp from the collision course that ultimately risks a regional war that could draw in U.S. forces.
- But it is unclear how long Iran and its proxies may hold off. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told reporters on Thursday that an Iranian attack could come with “little or no warning, and certainly could come in the coming days.”
- But multiple sources in the region told CBS News that Iran’s government continues to internally debate whether to use military force as it did on April 13, when it launched hundreds of drones and missiles towards Israel, or whether to conduct a covert intelligence operation.
- The U.S. assesses that Hezbollah could launch an attack with little to no warning.
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Important Takeaways:
- Kishida’s resignation opens the door to a chaotic era
- The prime minister’s decision not to seek another term may set up Japan’s most exciting race for a leader in years.
- Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party will elect its new leader late next month, and in recent weeks, the momentum in Tokyo had been swinging one way: That the unpopular but famously stubborn Kishida would run, and win, as potential successors demurred and bided their time for a better opportunity.
- That momentum suddenly ran out Wednesday when the prime minister announced he wouldn’t seek another term as LDP head, effectively tendering his resignation and throwing the race for Japan’s next leader into chaos.
- Parallels are there to be drawn with Joe Biden, the US president with whom he deepened the bilateral alliance.
- This time, all bets are off — at least right now. Up against a weak opposition, the LDP almost always wins national elections.
- But potential challengers should take a tip from Kishida, known to be a voracious reader. One of the prime minister’s favorite books is reportedly Crime & Punishment. Dostoyevsky writes that “power is only vouchsafed to the man who dares to stoop and pick it up… one has only to dare.”
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Important Takeaways:
- World War III Coming Soon, U.S. Military Woefully Unprepared
- “The Commission finds that DoD’s business practices, byzantine research and development and procurement systems, reliance on decades-old military hardware, and culture of risk avoidance reflect an era of uncontested military dominance… Such methods are not suited to today’s strategic environment…. The U.S. public are largely unaware of the dangers the United States faces or the costs (financial and otherwise) required to adequately prepare,” — Commission on the National Defense Strategy, July 29, 2024.
- “The Department’s usual laser focus on mission has been supplanted by Marxist-inspired instruction, an eradication of meritocracy in favor of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion promotion programs, with an extra emphasis placed on administration fetishes like climate change… The Chinese, Russian, North Korean, and Iranian militaries are not burdened by such nonsense.” — Blaine Holt, former US Air Force brigadier general, to Gatestone Institute, August 5, 2024.
- Unfortunately, Biden has not addressed the American people in a comprehensive and meaningful way about the greatest threat they face.
- The Commission on the National Defense Strategy is clear on what must be done: “A bipartisan ‘call to arms’ is urgently needed so that the United States can make the major changes and significant investments now rather than wait for the next Pearl Harbor or 9/11.”
- It is unlikely, however, that bad actors will give America a decade more to prepare.
- General Mike Minihan, the chief of the Air Force’s Air Mobility Command, predicted in a memorandum to his command leaked in January of last year that America would be in a war with China “in 2025.”
- Xi Jinping can see the United States is starting to stir; why would he wait for his foe to get ready?
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