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@ISIDEWITH submitted…7hrs7H
Iran has never made the decision to build a nuclear weapon, despite having at least most of the resources and capabilities it needs to do so, as far as we know. But Mr. Raisi’s death has created an opportunity for the hard-liners in the country who are far less allergic to the idea of going nuclear than the regime has been for decades.The recent exchange of hostilities with Israel, a country with an undeclared but widely acknowledged nuclear arsenal, has provoked a change of tone in Tehran. “We have no decision to build a nuclear bomb but should Iran’s existence be threatened, there will be no choice but to change our military doctrine,” Kamal Kharrazi, a leading adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, said on May 9.Today, Iran has thousands of advanced centrifuges and a large stockpile of enriched uranium. This, in turn, has provoked some camps inside Iran to adopt a “might as well” argument for nuclear weaponization. If we’ve already come this far, the argument goes, then why not just go for a bomb?Historically, Iran has felt a nuclear hedging strategy is its best defense against external aggression and invasion. And Tehran may continue to calculate that racing for a bomb would only invite more hostility, including from the United States. Then again, an increasingly distracted and unpredictable Washington might not be in a position to react forcefully against a sudden and rapid Iranian rush for a bomb, especially if Iran chooses its moment wisely.Between the war in Gaza, a possible change in American leadership, and a domestic power vacuum that the I.R.G.C. could step into, it is not difficult to imagine a brief window in which Iran could pull out the stops and surprise the world by testing a nuclear device.
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Remember Rafah? For months, the Biden Administration bitterly opposed an Israeli invasion of Hamas’s last stronghold in Gaza. The mantra was that Israel had “no credible plan” to evacuate the city’s 1.3 million civilians. Yet the Israelis went ahead anyway, and two weeks later they have safely evacuated an estimated 950,000 people.This was supposed to be impossible. Rafah became a red line for Mr. Biden on the logic that there was no way to conduct a major operation with all those civilians present. That was the justification for the President’s arms embargo. “We’re walking away from Israel’s ability to wage war in those areas,” he said.Even as the evacuation got under way, Secretary of State Antony Blinken repeated that Israel had “no credible plan.” National security adviser Jake Sullivan added, “We still believe it would be a mistake to launch a major military operation into the heart of Rafah.” When the evacuation began to work, the Biden team moved on to criticizing Israeli readiness for the “day after” the main fighting, as if success in Rafah were a foregone conclusion.Rafah remains critical to any day-after plan, since nothing can work if Hamas governs territory with military battalions and controls the Egyptian border. Israel has already discovered 50 tunnels crossing from Rafah into Egypt for smuggling. Once troops finish clearing a buffer zone along the border, Israel can cut off Hamas from Egypt, a key to strangling whatever insurgency may follow.Though Israeli liberals won’t like to hear it, Israel probably will need to fill the vacuum in Gaza for a time. Though Israeli right-wingers won’t like to hear it, the purpose would be to make way for local governance. The politics, there and here, explain why it has been easier to pretend there’s no plan at all.
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Proving Biden and his apparatchiks wrong is not the challenge - - the real challenge is remediating the damage done by a…
@ISIDEWITH submitted…5hrs5H
The presumptive Democratic nominee denounces Trump as a national security threat. He is “temperamentally unfit to hold an office that requires knowledge, stability and immense responsibility,” and he “has threatened to abandon our allies in Nato.” With this wildly-coiffed albatross around the neck of the Republican Party, a Democratic victory in November is assured.Or at least that’s how Democrats felt in the summer of 2016, when Hillary Clinton delivered that anti-Trump speech (one of many that campaign season). While the polls favoured Clinton, her anti-Trump message was not enough to win on Election Day. Clinton led with a message meant to appeal to the new base of the Democratic Party: affluent, highly-degreed voters. She dismissed pocketbook issues and tossed many Trump voters into a “basket of deplorables.” Rather than moderating on cultural politics, she instead ran to the Left.Despite some notable differences with Clinton’s 2016 campaign, Biden’s 2024 bid may risk falling into a similar trap. With forays into industrial policy and tariffs on select products from the People’s Republic of China, Biden has attempted to address some blue-collar economic concerns. Unlike Clinton, he has not ignored former “blue wall” states in the Midwest but instead directed campaign resources there.On cultural issues, his administration has been far less centrist than the “Joe from Scranton” branding would suggest. He has constantly allowed the progressive vanguard to set policy on identity, abortion, and education. Immigration is perhaps that most visible example of Biden abandoning moderation to appease the activist class
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Well, he lost the young voters because of Gaza, and the older voters to the open border and cost of living. Even for Bla…
People in Baltimore have been dying of overdoses at a rate never before seen in a major American city.Baltimore’s fatal overdose rate has quadrupled since 2013. It dipped in 2022, but preliminary data for 2023, not shown below, indicates overdoses were on track to rise again.In the past six years, nearly 6,000 lives have been lost. The death rate from 2018 to 2022 was nearly double that of any other large city, and higher than nearly all of Appalachia during the prescription pill crisis, the Midwest during the height of rural meth labs or New York during the crack epidemic.A decade ago, 700 fewer people here were being killed by drugs each year. And when fatalities began to rise from the synthetic opioid fentanyl, so potent that even minuscule doses are deadly, Baltimore’s initial response was hailed as a national model. The city set ambitious goals, distributed Narcan widely, experimented with ways to steer people into treatment and ratcheted up campaigns to alert the public.
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Our government is far more interested in funding wars overseas than they are in taking care of Americans or giving us ho…
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