NATO is worth paying for. Trump is right that Europe needs to do more.
President Donald Trump will attend the first NATO summit of his second term Tuesday, at a time when the alliance's 21st-century relevance has never been clearer — but when its sustainability is also in question, with a NATO-skeptical American president back in the Oval Office. Given these realities, Europe needs to show it will contribute its share to ensure the alliance is stable and strong.
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Atlantic
15 minutes ago
- Atlantic
Trump Wants to ‘Make Iran Great Again'
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. When Donald Trump raised the idea of toppling Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei yesterday, it wasn't just the idea that was surprising. It was the particular phrase he used to describe it. 'It's not politically correct to use the term, 'Regime Change,' but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn't there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!' he posted yesterday on Truth Social. The phrase became toxic for a reason. Two years ago, an essay in the Claremont Review of Books noted that regime change entered the popular lexicon in 'the early days of the 9/11 wars, when the Bush (43) Administration argued that the security of America and of the entire world depended not merely on defeating hostile countries militarily but on changing their governments into ones more inherently peaceable and favorable to our interests.' Of course, regimes change all the time, but regime change came to mean 'external, forcible transformation from 'authoritarianism' or 'dictatorship.'' This sounds very much like what Trump is discussing. Having switched from discouraging Israeli military strikes against Iran to joining them, he appears to now be toying with broader ambitions. (Trump offers few endorsements stronger than calling something 'politically incorrect.') But the writer of the Claremont Review essay, a prominent right-wing intellectual, warned about such projects. 'We know how that worked out. Regimes were changed all right, but not into democracies,' he wrote. 'And some of them—e.g., the one in Afghanistan—20 years later changed back to the same regime American firepower had overthrown in 2001.' That writer was Michael Anton. Today he is the director of the policy-planning staff at the State Department (a bit of an oxymoron in this administration), and in April, the White House named him to lead the U.S. delegation at technical talks with Iran on a nuclear deal—negotiations that are presumably irrelevant for the time being. Trump's abrupt shift has thrown the MAGA right into acrimony. In truth, the president has never been a pacificist, as I wrote last week. During the 2016 GOP primary, Trump cannily grasped public anger at the Iraq War and turned it against his rivals. Thinkers such as Anton and politicians such as Vice President J. D. Vance then tried to retrofit a more complete ideology of retrenchment and restraint onto it, but Trump is an improviser, not an ideologue. No one should have been too surprised by the president's order to bomb. Still, his rhetorical embrace of regime change was stunning even to those who never bought into his identity as a dove, and certainly to some of his aides. Perhaps Anton was not surprised to see his view so cavalierly discarded; after all, he once likened backing Trump to playing Russian roulette. But Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio were unprepared for the change in rhetoric. Rubio solemnly told Fox Business that the U.S. is not at war with the country it just dropped hundreds of thousands of pounds of ordnance on. Vance, on Meet the Press, insisted, 'Our view has been very clear that we don't want a regime change. We do not want to protract this or build this out any more than it's already been built out.' A few hours later, Trump contradicted him directly, in what would have been embarrassing for someone still capable of the emotion. Vance's views on foreign policy are deeply shaped by the Iraq War, in which he served. Now his boss is at risk of speedwalking that conflict one country to the east. The Iraq War was the product of months of preparation by the George W. Bush administration: military mobilization, avid though unsuccessful attempts to rally international support, an extended period of manufacturing consensus in Congress and in the American public. Yet despite that work, and as even proponents of regime change in Iran acknowledge, the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq War was a disaster, perhaps the worst American foreign-policy blunder in history. The U.S. government had good war plans for getting rid of Saddam Hussein's regime but had not effectively thought through what would happen after that. Trump has done even less of that thinking, and leads a nation far more politically divided and warier of foreign intervention. Americans have long viewed Iran negatively: A Fox News poll before this weekend's airstrikes found that roughly three-quarters of them view Iran as a 'real security threat.' Still, another poll earlier this month found that most don't want the U.S. to get involved in armed conflict there. A Pew Research Center poll in May even found that slightly more Americans think that the United States is its own 'greatest threat' than that Iran is. Trump's flippant transformation of 'Make America great again' into 'Make Iran great again' exemplifies the hubris of the Iraq War project that he had promised to leave behind. Just as U.S. officials claimed that Iraq could be easily and quickly converted into an American-style democracy, Trump wants to export his catchphrase to Iran, where the implementation would be even hazier than it is here. Iran is a country of some 90 million people, not a dollhouse to be rearranged. Can regime change work? The answer depends on how success is defined. In 1973, for example, the U.S. backed a coup in Chile, toppling the leftist leader Salvador Allende. It worked: Allende was killed and replaced by Augusto Pinochet, who created a stable, market-based, U.S.-friendly Chilean government. But doing that involved horrifying repression and the killing and disappearances of thousands of critics, leaving a black mark on the U.S. record. In another case of regime change, the U.S. government helped topple Iranian leader Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953. This, too, was an immediate success. Mossadegh was removed, and the Washington-friendly Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was restored to power. But the legacy of the moment stretched on much longer. The shah was also brutally repressive, and Iranians remembered the 1953 coup bitterly. In 1979, a revolution swept Iran, deposing Pahlavi and installing a virulently anti-American government. That regime still rules in Tehran—for now, at least. Here are three new stories from The Atlantic: Iran launched strikes on a U.S. base in Qatar, which were intercepted by Qatar's air-defense system, according to the Qatari government. The Supreme Court temporarily allowed the Trump administration to deport migrants to countries other than their own without giving them the chance to contest their removals. President Donald Trump called on 'everyone' to ' keep oil prices down ' after America's recent attack on Iranian nuclear sites sparked fear of higher oil prices. Dispatches Explore all of our newsletters here. Evening Read Extreme Violence Without Genocide By Graeme Wood Signs of violent criminality are ubiquitous in South Africa. Electric fences and guard dogs protect homes containing something worth stealing. Reported rapes, carjackings, and armed robberies all occur far more frequently than in the United States. In Bloemfontein, one of the safer cities, I asked a hotel clerk for directions to a coffee shop, and she said it was 'just across the road,' not more than 500 feet away. When I headed out on foot, she stopped me and said that for my safety, 'I would prefer that you drive.' More From The Atlantic Culture Break Play. In Death Stranding 2, people play as an unlikely hero: a courier who trips over rocks and experiences sunburn. It's the Amazonification of everything, now as a video game, Simon Parkin writes. Disconnect. Franklin Schneider has never owned a smartphone. And, based on the amount of social and libidinal energy that phones seem to have sucked from the world, he's not sure he ever wants to.
Fox News
18 minutes ago
- Fox News
Charlamagne says Dems 'sound like hypocrites' for demanding congressional approval for strikes
Radio host Charlamagne tha God called out Democrats on Monday for their outrage about President Donald Trump launching strikes on Iran without congressional authority, saying they turned a blind eye when Democrats recently did the same. The U.S. launched a surprise strike using B-2 stealth bombers on Iran's Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan nuclear facilities on Saturday. "All three sites sustained extremely severe damage and destruction," Joint Chiefs Chairman Air Force Gen. Dan Caine said during a briefing at the Pentagon on Sunday morning. Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., called out Trump for the strikes during a Sunday appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press," arguing the head of state should have begun the process by first "coming to Congress and asking for authorization to do this." He continued, "That's the constitutional approach to this. He could have talked to us about what the goal is and what the plan is ahead of time. And we could have had a discussion about it." Charlamagne agreed, but argued Democrats like Kelly should look in the mirror. "Morgyn, this is one of those times when politicians sound like hypocrites, because Mark Kelly is right, the president should get congressional approval," he said about the national war powers debate. "But there have been a bunch of presidents who have ordered strikes without congressional approval." "Barack Obama did it against Libya. Joe Biden ordered strikes in Iraq and Syria without congressional approval. Bill Clinton did it with - 'Kosovo' I think you pronounce it?" he recalled. "So presidents ordering military action without congressional approval has become pretty routine." Co-host Morgyn V. Wood noted that this issue is now being cited for possible impeachment. "So why didn't it lead to an impeachment for everybody else? Like, when Barack Obama did it, when Biden did it, when Clinton did it?" Charlamagne asked. Wood said that there have been calls for impeachment over presidents' military actions without congressional approval before, but Charlamagne was not persuaded. "I don't even remember hearing about it during the Joe Biden administration," Charlamagne said. "I guess that's just because of the way Trump has been moving," co-host DJ Envy said. "But we didn't hear about it when Obama did it. We didn't hear about it when Biden did it." "I do remember when Obama did it," Charlamagne said. "When Obama did it, I do remember, you know, people in Congress saying he needed congressional approval, and they were making it a thing. I don't remember the Biden thing at all. I don't remember that even making a headline." After Wood recalled the widespread outrage over Biden's botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, Charlamagne said he recalled Biden's lack of accountability for military missteps after an NBC News piece headlined, "Presidents' ordering military action without Congress' approval has become routine."
Yahoo
18 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Key Mike Lee proposal stripped from Trump budget bill
WASHINGTON — A proposal to expand congressional control over federal policy decisions was stripped from President Donald Trump's massive tax bill over the weekend despite a push from GOP leaders to include the language. The provision, a slimmed-down version of Sen. Mike Lee's REINS Act, sought to implement new requirements for federal agencies, subjecting proposed agency actions to be approved by Congress before they can take effect. The statute primarily targeted policies that increase revenue and would allow for review of past rules already approved by agencies. However, that measure was removed from the bill's language on Sunday by the Senate parliamentarian, a nonpartisan adviser who must evaluate each provision in the tax bill to ensure it adheres to the strict rules of reconciliation. Through the budget reconciliation process, Republicans can circumvent Democratic opposition and prevent a filibuster to expedite the passage of certain legislation and go around the minority party by enacting key pieces of their agenda with a simple majority vote. There are certain rules that dictate how often reconciliation can be used, and the procedure can only be utilized to advance budget-related legislation such as taxes, spending and the debt limit. Once a budget reconciliation blueprint is finalized, it then only requires a simple majority in the House and Senate to pass. However, the parliamentarian ruled that the current language related to Lee's REINS Act did not adhere to those guidelines, making it ineligible for simple-majority passage. However, Lee could still adjust the language before the package reaches the Senate floor, which GOP leaders hope to accomplish by the end of this week. Lee has pushed for years to pass the REINS Act, which would require regulations with an economic impact of $100 million or more to be approved by Congress, giving lawmakers more control over how agencies operate. Under current law, Congress has the authority to pass resolutions that nullify certain agency regulations if those rules are considered to be harmful. However, the REINS Act would seek to ensure that most proposed regulations must first be cleared by Congress before it takes effect, giving lawmakers the ability to halt certain regulations if they disapprove. Some version of the REINS Act has been introduced in every Congress since 2009. The House has managed to pass several iterations of the bill but the proposal has never managed to pass the Senate, where it would typically need 60 votes to be approved. And to get enough votes to support it, Lee is suggesting to somehow attach the bill to the reconciliation package, which would only require 50 votes in the Senate. Lee has not yet publicly responded to the parliamentarian's ruling, and his office did not respond to a request for comment by the Deseret News.
