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True despair.

“The important things are always simple; the simple things are always hard.” — Murphy’s First Law of Combat There will never be a better time than now to end the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran. The Israelis have established air superiority over the length and breadth of Iran, and apparently are able to operate unimpeded to strike any and all targets of their choosing. The challenge for Israel lies in the choosing. Continue an air campaign focused on eliminating Iran’s nuclear weapons program and its ballistic missile program, or expand the scope of attacks to undermine the Iranian economy and bring down the current theocratic dictatorship. Or, as part of a comprehensive regime change strategy, take on the task of eliminating Iran’s political leadership, up to and including the Ayatollah Khamenei himself. (RELATED: Iran Miscalculated. The Ayatollahs Must be Removed.) We don’t need to make this complicated. The direct pursuit of regime change is a bad idea, one that Israel should reject and that the U.S. should emphatically discourage.There seems little doubt that Israel could kill Khamenei and many among his wider circle, effectively decapitating the current regime. Donald Trump has said as much, just this afternoon on Truth Social, speaking of both Israeli and U.S. capabilities. But having this ability and acting upon it are two very different things. (RELATED: Basic Thoughts on Iran) Those who favor a regime change strategy express an implied faith in the ability of the Iranian people to, in effect, step forward on their own initiative and create a democratic, peace-seeking alternative. There’s probably no other country in the Middle East better suited to building just an alternative, once the heavy hand of the mullahs is finally removed. But it would have to be built — there’s no such ready-made alternative currently waiting in the wings, only inchoate political movements, none ready at a moment’s notice to assume power. And, likely as not, potential rivals for power rather than allies. It’s been very clear for a long time that the vast majority of Iranians yearn for something better than the Khamenei regime, but when the time comes, they will need to work things out for themselves. Netanyahu seems to understand this. When questioned on this point, he’s insisted that Israel’s current campaign is not intended to bring down the Ayatollah, although he also readily allows that it could well create space for the Iranian people to rise up and throw the theocrats out. This is wise, and it’s a wisdom we in the U.S. should embrace, if for no other reason than to avoid being scapegoated by the usual suspects. (RELATED: Israel’s Greatest Hits So Far in Days Long War Against Iran) We’ve been blamed, unfairly in my view, for the 1954 coup that replaced Mossadegh with the Shah. There’s no need to repeat the experience. The Israelis, again, seem to understand the need to walk carefully in this regard. We should do the same. The Real Question: Nuclear-armed Iran? The real choice, then, is a very simple one, and it’s our choice much more than Israel’s. If we are convinced that we cannot live with a nuclear-armed Iranian regime bent on promoting sharia supremacy throughout the world, bent on destroying first the “little Satan” of Israel and then the “Great Satan” of the U.S., then the moment of decision has come. Israel’s air campaign has created the conditions in which Iran’s nuclear facilities can be destroyed, but Israel lacks the ability to deploy the one conventional weapon capable of completing the job. The MOAB deep-penetrator bomb is required, and only U.S. Air Force B-2 bombers can deliver it accurately. (RELATED: America First: Keep Our Boys Out of It, but Shoot Down Iranian Ballistics and Drop a MOAB or Two) We’ve always said that we can’t live with a nuclear-armed Iran. Every president in recent memory has insisted on this, and Donald Trump has reiterated the point this very week. There have always been those who’ve scoffed at this, those who’ve maintained that an existential risk to Israel is no business of ours, and that we’re safely distant from any Iranian threat. But we once said that of North Korea, and now we find that Kim Jong Un has nuclear-tipped missiles that can reach our west coast, and perhaps soon the whole of the U.S. Moreover, we’ve endured a decades-long postgraduate seminar in drug smuggling and human trafficking, replete with lessons in the difficulty of securing our borders against small packages smuggled by a dedicated adversary. Once Iran has the bomb, we are at risk, even if it lacks an ICBM to deliver it. If Putin can paralyze NATO — and Joe Biden — with the threat of deploying a few tactical nukes, then it’s painful to imagine what the Ayatollah or his successors might achieve. (RELATED: The Travel Ban Policy Overhaul) By all accounts, they are close, anywhere from weeks to months away, certainly less than a year. That’s the threat. The opportunity lies in the fact that the Israelis have created a level of air dominance sufficient to permit the U.S. Air Force to come in and complete the job. This convergence of threat and opportunity has never existed before, and there are no guarantees that it will last indefinitely. Putin and Xi have proven themselves quite happy with the current Iranian regime; even now, they may be looking for ways to shift the calculus once again in the Ayatollah’s favor. The choice facing President Trump is clear. Like as not, there will likely never be a bigger moment for him than now. He can make a decision for world peace, even if, ironically, such a decision requires an act of war. The risk, of course, is great. Even with Israeli air dominance, putting American bombers over targets deep in Iran means risking American lives. It also means risking a terror campaign in the U.S., when we already know that Iranian subversive assets have been infiltrated into the country. It means convulsions on U.S. campuses as the pro-Hamas demonstrators — who’ve always been pawns of the mullahs — come out in force. But the potential reward is also great. A defanged Iran, no longer able to threaten annihilation to Israel, no longer safe to promote turmoil throughout the Middle East, no longer the inviolable patron of Islamist revolution across the western world, and, above all, on the streets and campuses of the U.S. A message sent that the time of feckless U.S. leadership is at an end, that when we say “America First” we’re prepared to back it with resolute action — all of this accomplished without the pretense of nation-building or of spreading democracy. Hard-headed, limited, decisive. The choice, then, is simple, and no different from the choices that have defined the greatest presidents down through our history. Whatever choice President Trump makes, the decision will be challenging, and certainly one of the most important that’s ever faced an American president. But the important things are always simple — and the simple things are very hard. READ MORE from James H. McGee: The ‘New Warfare’ Comes of Age: Are We Ready? Mirrors Instead of Windows: America’s Failed Foreign Policy Perspective Splitting Xi From Putin: A Comfortable Delusion James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. His 2022 novel, Letter of Reprisal, tells the tale of a desperate mission to destroy a Chinese bioweapon facility hidden in the heart of the central African conflict region. A soon-to-be-published sequel, The Zebras from Minsk, finds the Reprisal team fighting against Chinese and Russian-backed terrorists who’ve infiltrated our southern border in a conspiracy that ranges from West Virginia to the forests of Belarus. You can find Letter of Reprisal on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback editions, and on Kindle Unlimited. The post Ending the Ayatollah’s Nuclear Threat: No Better Time Than Now appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Trump Derangement Syndrome claimed many casualties over the years. Big names fell like dominoes in a Hollywood earthquake. Robert De Niro morphed from a psychopathic gangster to a psychotic neighbor who threatens mailmen for delivering campaign flyers. Tom Hanks plummeted from wholesome everyman to that whiny wine mom who lectures cashiers about democracy while buying organic quinoa. Billy Joe Armstrong of Green Day devolved into a has-been punk rocker cosplaying as Che Guevara at suburban music festivals. Rosie O’Donnell, the human equivalent of a car alarm going off at 3 AM, fled to Ireland. Ellen DeGeneres ditched America for England, trading political drama for a country where the sun hasn’t been seen since the Renaissance. But Sean Penn takes the cake… eats it, then hurls it at anyone not willing to join his moral crusade. The recent Club Random episode with Bill Maher revealed Penn’s complete break from reality. Here’s a man who tongue-kissed every communist dictator from Havana to Caracas. Yet somehow, he developed moral qualms about his friend having dinner with a democratically elected president. Maher, bless his cynical heart, didn’t let this slide. “Really? You’ll meet with Castro and Hugo Chávez, but not the president of the United States?” The question hung in the air like a fart in an elevator — undeniable, awkward, and reeking of hypocrisy. Penn’s moral compass doesn’t just spin wildly; it’s been replaced by a Magic 8-Ball that only gives answers like “Revolutionary Socialism” and “Orange Man Bad.” This is, after all, the same Sean Penn who once praised Castro’s “humor” and waxed poetic about the dictator’s “affectionate tolerance” — as if gulags were just misunderstood retreats. He’s heaped adoration on Hugo Chávez too, brushing off Venezuela’s economic implosion and descent into tyranny by insisting America was somehow worse. According to Penn, U.S. media were more propagandistic than Chávez’s state-run mouthpieces. That was his defense. (RELATED: Venezuela Follows the Classic Path of Radical Socialism) And Trump? A different standard entirely. Penn once called him “an enemy of Americans,” suggested he might try to “destroy the world,” and urged the public to reject him like a virus. On Club Random, he practically convulsed at the notion of dining with Trump, equating the idea with spiritual contamination. No argument. No policy critique. Just disgust so intense it borders on puritanical hysteria. This is where Trump Derangement Syndrome reaches its final evolutionary form. It’s not enough to disagree with policies or vote differently. The fully infected must construct elaborate moral hierarchies where communist butchers rank higher than Republicans. Where lunch with mass murderers is brave journalism, but dinner with Trump is collaboration with Satan’s interior decorator. They’ve confused playing heroes with being heroes. What we’re seeing isn’t political nuance; it’s theological delusion. Trump has become such a totem of evil in these circles that anyone who shook his hand is cast as ritually unclean. Meanwhile, men who jailed poets and shot dissidents get romanticized as misunderstood revolutionaries. It’s a performance of piety for a secular church that hands out indulgences to anyone who chants the right slogans. (RELATED: Why Morgan Wallen Terrifies the Left) Penn embodies Hollywood’s complete detachment from planet Earth. He’s the guy who interviewed El Chapo while Mexican mothers prayed their children wouldn’t get beheaded by cartel members. He’s the actor who thinks memorizing lines makes him qualified to solve geopolitical crises. He’s the celebrity who confuses method acting with actual wisdom, like thinking you understand quantum physics because you played a scientist in a movie. The syndrome manifests differently in each victim, but each response reveals the same core problem: an inability to process that maybe, just maybe, half the country isn’t comprised of fascist demons who eat babies for breakfast. Penn’s particular strain is weapons-grade derangement. He doesn’t just hate Trump — he’s constructed an entire parallel universe where American presidents are worse than genocidal maniacs. The Castro worship is particularly revealing. Here’s a dictator who ruled Cuba like a tropical Gulag operator. But somehow he earned Penn’s breathless admiration. Meanwhile, Trump — elected through the same democratic process that installed every other president — is literally Voldemort with a spray tan. This isn’t principled opposition. It’s performance art disguised as morality. The gap between Penn’s Castro-enthusiasm and Trump-hatred reveals something deeper than political disagreement. It exposes a complete rejection of American democratic legitimacy. The tragedy isn’t that celebrities have opinions. Everyone’s entitled to their delusions. The tragedy is watching allegedly intelligent people tie themselves into philosophical pretzels to justify their contradictions. Penn isn’t stupid — his brain just got hijacked by ideology and taken on a joy ride through Crazytown. Hollywood’s Trump derangement created a generation of celebrity prophets without portfolios or prescriptions. They speak with the authority of their fame but the wisdom of their publicists. They mistake volume for virtue, intensity for insight. They’ve confused playing heroes with being heroes. Penn, however, represents the syndrome’s peak absurdity. A celebrity so divorced from consequences that he treats international relations like casting calls for his personal revolutionary fantasy film. The real question isn’t why Penn hates Trump — half the country does. It’s why he loves Castro more than American democracy. Hollywood elites like Penn will forgive any atrocity as long as it comes wrapped in anti-American rhetoric. They’ll excuse any oppression if it sounds sufficiently revolutionary, like calling mass murder “social justice with extreme prejudice.” Sean Penn didn’t just lose his marbles over Trump. He gathered them up, dipped them in crazy sauce, and hurled them at anyone who dared suggest that maybe, possibly, American democracy isn’t worse than Cuban communism. The mess he left behind tells us more about celebrity culture than any sociology textbook ever could. Sometimes the most revealing conversations happen when people accidentally expose their own insanity while thinking they’re being profound. Penn achieved that rare feat: making Bill Maher look like the reasonable one in the room. READ MORE from John Mac Ghlionn: America’s Dumbest Refugees Pick God’s Cruelest Joke Soap, Sex, and Simulacra: Hollywood’s Latest Moment of Madness Taylor Swift a Self-Made Billionaire? The post The Curious Case of the Castro-Cuddling, Trump-Hating Humanitarian appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

For over a century, Luther Seminary has called its beautiful campus in St. Paul, Minnesota, home. Apart from its buildings in the Collegiate Gothic style, the campus is also the site of the log cabin Old Muskego Church. The chapel was constructed in 1844 by devoutly Lutheran Norwegian immigrants in Wisconsin. In 1904, the chapel was transported, piece by piece, to Luther Seminary’s campus. Luther’s students and faculty are now leaving all of that behind. Last week, the seminary’s board of directors announced that they have voted to sell the campus. The Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal has reported that the value of the site is greater than $8.7 million. While the seminary was once the bustling home of those aspiring to become pastors in the nation’s largest Lutheran denomination, it has in recent years grown increasingly quiet. More and more students have opted to simply take classes online on a part-time basis. Meanwhile, international students have become a large portion of those populating the physical campus. Luther Seminary remains, however, the ELCA’s largest seminary. Over the decades, those aspiring to be pastors in mainline denominations such as the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America have grown increasingly older. The number of pastors who work full-time jobs in addition to their time preaching on Sundays has also grown. Online learning options therefore make more sense to this majority for whom being a pastor is a capstone achievement rather than a life mission. The seminary is seeking to purchase a much smaller physical location in Minneapolis, at which “periodic in-person learning” will take place. Evidently, the online model will take over, with occasional seminars to reinforce the seminary’s mission. This model, said the seminary’s president, the Rev. Robin Steinke, will make the school more “nimble.” She explained, “The way students learn and prepare for ministry has changed. Now is the right time to align our resources with that reality and evolve how we deliver on our mission.” Luther Seminary has experienced an endless downward spiral of lower and lower enrollments alongside financial difficulties. Its enrollment has fallen from more than 600 students in 2007 to 183 students in 2024, when measured by full-time student equivalency, according to the Association of Theological Schools. Its current president arrived at the school after the previous president resigned following multimillion-dollar deficits. Many, if not most, mainline seminaries have experienced similar fates. Luther Seminary’s decline also matches that of the ELCA more generally. According to religion statistician Ryan Burge, from 2003 to 2023, the membership of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America declined 46 percent. While the ELCA had just under 5 million members in 2003, that number fell to 2.79 million baptized members in 2023. (RELATED: How a Church Fought Back Against a Liberal Takeover — And Won) What is astounding about Luther Seminary’s decline is that almost all students receive a full-tuition scholarship. Even still, potential students don’t think losing several years of income is worth the value of the degree. The problem, at base, is that the ELCA is struggling to attract candidates for ordination. ***** The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is a left-leaning denomination. It has, since its formation, ordained women as pastors. In 2009, the denomination allowed “LGBTQIA+ individuals” to be ordained. On abortion, the denomination says, “A developing life in the womb does not have an absolute right to be born, nor does a pregnant woman have an absolute right to terminate a pregnancy.” Officially, the church says that it “lacks consensus” on the topic of homosexuality, but the reality is much different. This Pride Month, the week before the ELCA’s largest seminary announced the upcoming closure of its campus, the denomination’s presiding bishop, Elizabeth Eaton, delivered a message to her church in which she said the teachings of the apostle Paul and Martin Luther call people to “honor the full dignity of every person: every sex, every gender, and every body.” (RELATED: How Naivety Is Allowing Unbiblical Progressivism Into Evangelical Churches) “We have a chance to renew our commitments to the LGBTQIA+ community,” she further said, “to speak with grace and unity that we are a part of God’s great creation.” On its website, Luther Seminary prominently features a “land acknowledgment” about its campus: “Luther Seminary is on Miní Sóta Makhóčhe, the homelands of the Dakhóta Oyáte. The Ojibwe, Ho-Chunk, Cheyenne, Oto, Iowa, and the Sac & Fox also inhabited Minnesota land.” Perhaps Luther Seminary will decide to give back its stolen land. READ MORE from Ellie Gardey Holmes: Gavin Newsom’s Presidential Campaign Unofficially Begins The Bella Ramsey Disaster Michelle Obama’s Strange Vision of the Female Reproductive System The post Major Left-Leaning Lutheran Seminary Announces Sale of Historic Campus appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The United States is involved to varying degrees in four regional conflicts that have the potential to evolve into a global conflagration. Wars are currently raging in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, India and Pakistan recently clashed, while tensions continue to rise in the Indo-Pacific. The Eurasian landmass is a tinderbox, and it will take prudent statesmanship to avoid setting more of it on fire. Fortunately, the United States has a president whose instincts are to dampen conflicts and mediate geopolitical disputes before they get out of control. President Donald Trump wants to resolve the “Third World Wars” before they are transformed into the Third World War. In his brilliant analysis of the Second World War, Victor Davis Hanson showed “how fighting different enemies, alongside disparate allies, in greatly different ways across the globe coalesced into one war.” The Second World War emerged from a variety of regional conflicts beginning with Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and eastern China in 1937; a proxy war between Germany and Soviet Russia in Spain beginning in 1936; Germany’s conquest of Czechoslovakia in 1938; Germany and the Soviet Union’s attack on Poland in September 1939; Britain and France versus Germany in 1939-40; Japan versus the Soviet Union in 1939; the Soviet Union’s war with Finland in 1940, and its occupation of the Baltic states in 1940; Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union in 1941; Japan’s attack upon the United States in December 1941, followed by Britain’s declaration of war against Japan and Germany’s declaration of war against the United States. “[B]y the end of 1941,” Hanson writes, “something quite cataclysmic followed: all the smaller conflicts compounded unexpectedly into a total, global war.” (RELATED: Who Won World War II?) The result of the coalescence of the regional wars into a global war between 1931 and 1945 was some 60 million dead; the firebombing of cities; mass starvation; and widespread disease. The global war ended with the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japanese cities, ushering in the nuclear age. No one foresaw this in 1931, and very few appreciated the oncoming catastrophe even as late as 1939. Thucydides noted long ago that war is caused by fear, honor, and interest. Wars tend to get out of hand. As Hanson writes and history confirms, “Starting wars is far easier than ending them.” In the late 19th century, Germany’s Chancellor Otto von Bismarck once expressed the fear that the next great war would result from some damned foolish thing in the Balkans. He proved to be quite prescient. The First World War, like the Second World War, started as a series of regional wars in the Balkans, culminating in a war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia in July 1914. The rigid alliance system (and Germany’s war plans) brought Germany into the war on the side of Austria-Hungary, Russia on the side of Serbia, and France on the side of Russia. The prolific British historian Niall Ferguson in The Pity of War wrote that Great Britain was not committed to joining the war by any formal alliance, but its statesmen were drawn in by a misreading of German war aims. Britain’s entry into the war, however, guaranteed that the war would globalize because of Britain’s far-flung empire. The Russia–Ukraine War is more than three years old, and the casualties are piling up with no end in sight. The U.S. and NATO involvement on the side of Ukraine has enabled Ukraine to continue fighting (including its recent long-range drone strike that destroyed more than 40 Russian strategic bombers), but also threatens to widen the war should Russia strike a NATO country. (RELATED: Putin Caught in an Expanding Spiderweb) Meanwhile, China, Iran, and North Korea have assisted Russia in its war effort, while America’s key Middle East ally, Israel, has gone to war with Iran, whose leaders have threatened to strike U.S. interests in the region. India, a U.S. ally, and Pakistan, a Chinese ally, have recently renewed their geopolitical conflict over Kashmir. And tensions between the U.S. (and its regional allies Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia) and China continue to rise in the western Pacific as China pledges to reunify Taiwan with the mainland peacefully or by force if necessary. (RELATED: China’s Threat to Taiwan: Intentions and Capabilities) In the lead-up to the First and Second World Wars, statesmen made decisions based on the Thucydidean calculus of fear, honor, and interest, and hurled the world into global cataclysms. A third such cataclysm would involve perhaps many, if not most, of the world’s nine nuclear powers, who have a combined arsenal of approximately 12,000 nuclear warheads. President Trump’s top foreign policy priority at the moment is to prevent the ongoing regional conflicts from metastasizing across the globe. READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa: Obama Trusted Iran — Israel Didn’t The Two Americas The Party of Anarchy The post Avoiding the Third World Wars appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.