Religion GOP Can Learn Abortion Lesson from Methodist Infighting  Republicans must remain the pro-life party. Anti-abortion campaigners celebrate outside the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC, on June 24, 2022. (Photo by OLIVIER DOULIERY / AFP) (Photo by OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images) Before my United Methodist Church began its final descent into theological madness, disparate elements were trying to drag it left or right on various issues through the denomination’s messy democratic process. Nowhere was this more apparent than on abortion. The church was an early adopter of the “prayerfully pro-choice” position before Roe v. Wade, but its teachings were gradually revised in a more pro-life direction over time as the more conservative Methodists organized to fight back against leftward drifts. This included opposition to abortion as a form of birth control, recognition of at least potential fetal personhood, and eventually support for banning partial-birth abortion. Despite this incremental improvement, the Methodist social principles on abortion even at their best were a bit of a muddled mess. Of course, that is true of public opinion about abortion in general and is what you would expect of compromise language written for people with divergent views. This brings us to the newly revised GOP platform in which the pro-life plank is, if not quite gutted, the most equivocal it has been since 1976, when it truly was a compromise between Republicans on different sides of the abortion debate, after the convention fight between Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. Ford and Jimmy Carter went into the general election with relatively nuanced positions on abortion by today’s standards, with the parties not really sorting on the issue until Reagan won four years later. The former President Donald Trump recognizes that Democrats have successfully branded any federal legislation on abortion post-Roe as a “national ban” or “federal ban” on abortion. This is true even when the public supports the details of the actual bill in question, which is a problem because they do oppose a blanket “national ban.” Trump is eager to avoid this problem. He therefore wishes to avoid federal legislation on the topic and rebrand the Democrats as extremist defenders of late-term abortion. I think Trump is generally correct as a matter of short-term political strategy and that abortion lawmaking cannot be as divorced from public opinion as judicially imposed abortion policy was for nearly 50 years of Roe. Where Trump goes off the rails is in his conceit that some final Art of the Deal compromise can be reached on abortion. The mixture of federalism and the Fourteenth Amendment makes the abortion plank incoherent, which could be forgiven as a matter of democratic haggling finally allowed by Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and also likely to inflame both sides.  States possess police powers under the Constitution. That is the proper level of government to regulate abortion as a practice that involves the taking of innocent human life. The laws that protect magazine editors and political columnists from homicide are largely enacted at the state level. But, under the Fourteenth Amendment, a state legalizing the killing of magazine editors and political columnists would be problematic. A better approach would be for the Republican platform to explicitly oppose abortion except in cases of rape, incest, and when the mother’s life is in danger without specifying the level of government that should enact this policy. This has been Trump’s formal position on abortion since circa 2016 and that of every Republican presidential nominee since Reagan.  The plank should take a victory lap on the reversal of Roe, which could also justify the deletion of the human life amendment endorsement. Here you could talk up states getting back the power to legislate abortion. One problem with this is that the Fourteenth Amendment language was obviously the get for the big pro-life groups, even if it is simultaneously the hook Democrats are using to claim Republicans still support a federal ban on abortion without appeasing grassroots pro-life activists who are demoralized by the platform. Party platforms are mainly symbolic, but it is still important to avoid the GOP drifting away from being pro-life. Trump’s mifepristone stance, for example, is a troubling substantive rather than strategic concession. But it is also likelier that a Democratic White House and Congress will pass a bill “codifying Roe” that negates many state-level pro-life laws than the same combinations of Republicans getting a 15-week ban across the finish line. Eventually, most conservatives decided to leave the United Methodist Church and now it is free to let its freak flag fly on abortion. While a church is more important than a political party, that’s hopefully not a window into the Republican future.  The post GOP Can Learn Abortion Lesson from Methodist Infighting  appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs French Elections Could Have Been Worse Rassemblement National still has the wind at its back. Credit: Christian Liewig – Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images If you are someone who hopes and believes that France will, under some form of right or right-center or centrist government, effectively stop mass Third-World migration and say no to the “Great Replacement,” last Sunday’s election results are not the worst possible news. Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party received far and away the most votes, though not what counts: the most elected deputies. The trick of proclaiming the that the Le Pen party is “far-right” and beyond the pale still works in France to a degree; in the second round of voting, candidates from the liberal technocratic Macronists allied with the moderate and far left, standing down and endorsing one another in many districts and keeping the National Rally to about 140 delegates. Polls which had a week ago forecast a substantial National Rally victory—200 delegates, perhaps 250—shifted in the final days. Le Pen’s young protégé, 28-year-old Jordan Bardella, will not be France’s next prime minister.  For friends of the French right, broadly defined, this may not be the most terrible outcome. It was admittedly a little difficult to imagine Bardella, almost unknown in France two years ago, actually becoming prime minister of France right now. The National Rally ran a handful of candidates who were not ready for prime time, which Bardella acknowledged in his concession speech Sunday night. The issues that have propelled the National Rally to be the first party in France—the combined sense that French elites are out of touch with common people, and that immigration is bit by bit making France unrecognizable to itself—have not been resolved. They certainly won’t be by whatever strange coalition Emmanuel Macron’s still unnamed new prime minister will come up with, which will necessarily include communists, former Trotskyites, more moderate socialists, and militantly Third-World members of La France Insoumise, veteran left-winger Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party.  It is almost a given that such a coalition will not be able to govern coherently, and it is not clear what ideological faction will hold sway. Confidence that the “center”—embodied by Emanuel Macron, whose bourgeois technocratic adherents are known by the derisive term la macronie—will obviously prevail in any face-off with their new leftist partners seems unrealistic. The French are weary of Macron; Mélenchon, for all his catering to the extreme Third-Worldist left, still comes across as a traditional French politician, masculine in a way that appeals to both men and women—and that Macron does not.  One obvious silver lining of the election results is that Macron’s bid to get France more involved in the Ukraine war (he floated the idea of sending French troops there earlier this year) is almost certainly dead for now. His new governing coalition partners include extreme hawks: The socialist leader Raphaël Glucksmann is as war mongering as Tom Cotton, but is in the company of leftists with residual pro-Russia sentiments and NATO skeptics like Mélenchon. The political forces that might support an escalation of the war against Moscow have been weakened.  As for the future, France does not have a stable and coherent governing majority now, and won’t for a year, which is when the soonest new parliamentary elections can be held. The country will hold together—there is robust and competent civil service—but the prevailing winds that brought the National Rally to the top of the polls blow still. The overall electoral trend for the National Rally in terms of deputies and voter support is overwhelmingly favorable over that of the past 10 years. Whether this points to an eventual National Rally victory, or a still conceivable alliance between a center-right politician and Le Pen’s party—a Sarkozy with some populist force behind him—is unknown, but it could and should happen. Seeing the far left in partial power—a genuinely violent Antifa type actually won in one district, supported by la macronie—makes such a development more likely.  It is, of course, possible that France could have a realigning election in the other direction, something that signals that the old France is genuinely dead, that a new multicultural post-France is being born. Something like that election of the “moderate” Islamist in Michel Houellebecq’s novel Soumission. But it didn’t happen last Sunday. The post French Elections Could Have Been Worse appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics Why ‘America First’ Means Pro-European Union The EU is the best bet for American disentanglement from the continent. Donald Trump hasn’t yet commented on the stunning election results in France, but it’s a good bet he was disappointed that the Rassemblement National underperformed, coming in third place behind the far-left and centrist blocs.. Trump and Marine Le Pen, the face of the right-populist party, have long supported one another. And Euroskeptic leaders outside France also feel an affinity with the 45th president, whose hostility to the European Union and forceful defense of nationalism they admire. But while Trump and the MAGA Republicans have a natural affinity with European right-populists, the two groups are not, upon closer examination, natural allies. Trump wants the U.S. to start disengaging militarily from Europe, but that’s less likely to happen if the continent is torn apart by petit nationalisme. To convert his America-First rhetoric into reality in a second term, Trump will need Europe to unify as a great power on the world stage—and pro-EU centrists, not anti-EU right-populists, are the ones pushing for unification. France’s President Emmanuel Macron has led the charge in advancing what he calls “Power Europe,” while European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and outgoing foreign policy chief Josep Borrell have been pushing to turbocharge Europe’s defense industrial capacity. These leaders, widely despised by right-populists the world over, are responding rationally and strategically to global developments. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has made the unthinkable—high-intensity war on the continent—a grim reality again. And with the rise of China and the dawn of multipolarity, Washington’s attention is being diverted away from Europe to the Asia-Pacific. But the surge of right-populism across Europe could slow, if not reverse, European integration in the security sphere. Reactionary nationalism threatens to hobble the formation of pan-European identity. More prosaically, if right-populists take over the EU, they will return the powers of Brussels to the capitals of member nations, complicating efforts to centralize strategic planning and coordinate weapons procurement. The liberal center is holding, for now, but a sharp right-populist turn would drag Europe toward geopolitical disunity—which is precisely where MAGA Republicans should not want it to go. Trump supporters who favor a more restrained US foreign policy, or who see China and not Russia as America’s main adversary, say Europe should shoulder a greater defense burden in its region. Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH), a possible Trump running mate, is one of MAGA-world’s most eloquent spokesmen for this view. In an op-ed for the Financial Times entitled “Europe Must Stand on Its Own Two Feet on Defense,” Vance wrote that Europe’s deep cuts in military spending since the Cold War have amounted to “an implied tax on the American people to allow for the security of Europe.” The Ohio senator continued: “The question each European nation needs to ask itself is this: are you prepared to defend yourself? And the question the U.S. must ask is: if our European allies can’t even defend themselves, are they allies, or clients?” Vance’s perspective follows in an American tradition tracing back to the Founding. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson warned of entangling alliances that outlive their utility. James Monroe, in proclaiming his namesake doctrine, not only warned European powers to cease interference in the western hemisphere but foreswore American involvement in European affairs. The Jacksonian variant of this tradition eschews nation-building and missionary liberalism, opposes wars of choice, but supports decisive force to win wars that are in the national interest. In the 20th century, Pat Buchanan took up the mantle of this very American, realist sub-tradition in his campaigns for president and in books like A Republic, Not an Empire. Vance has been called the “heir” of Buchanan, and Trump’s political rhetoric and instincts, if not his policy record, are Buchananite. Paradoxically, a neo-Buchananite, Trumpist American foreign policy program dovetails with Macronism, not Le Penism, and for two reasons: First, if a withdrawal of American power from Europe ultimately revitalizes intra-European, nationalistic rivalry, the U.S. may be compelled to resume its presence there to calm tensions. Second, while neither France nor Germany nor Italy can be a great power in the 21st century, Europe can be—and only a great power can safeguard the region from Chinese dominance, Russian intimidation, and American dependency. Macron dreams of a sovereign and united Europe, while his right-populist rivals in France, sensing a threat to national sovereignty, seek to thwart his vision. Macron has a better relationship with President Joe Biden than with Trump, but realism teaches that, in an anarchic international system, individual leaders and their interpersonal bonds matter less than the distribution of military power. While Macron initially welcomed Biden’s presidency, he’s been disappointed by Biden’s pursuit of anti-China policies that have damaged European interests. Meanwhile, Biden’s embrace of the transatlantic alliance, by reassuring European centrists, has dampened their push to become less dependent on America. Macron should see Trumpism as a blessing in disguise for Europe. The French President’s controversial aim to extend France’s nuclear umbrella over the continent will attract more support if doubts grow about the reliability of America’s own umbrella. More generally, Trump’s antipathy to NATO helps Macron make the case for European strategic autonomy. Macron will need more than pretty speeches to convince his European compatriots to build a robust security community—he’ll need precisely the structural incentives that a second Trump presidency would make stronger and more salient. Trump, for his part, instead of mocking Macron and casting the European Union as a “foe,” should praise European integration as being in America’s national interest. And rather than simply disparaging NATO’s over-reliance on America, Trump should offer an alternative vision: a “dormant NATO” that sees EU nations take the lead in Europe while the U.S. waits in the wings, ready to act, if needed, as an offshore balancer. During the Cold War, Europe relied on the U.S. to contain the Soviet Union. Afterwards, it was content to let the remaining superpower continue subsidizing its defense. Today, amid the rise of China and resurgence of Russia, if Europe doesn’t take responsibility for its own security, either the U.S. will become badly over-stretched or American support will be wrenched away before Europe is ready.  Trump, not Biden, is pushing Europe to stop being an American protectorate and become a legitimate world power, so that America can devote scarce resources elsewhere. And since European right-populism undermines this project, “America First” means pro–European Union, however paradoxical that may seem. The post Why ‘America First’ Means Pro-European Union appeared first on The American Conservative.

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During the 2012 presidential debates, Gov. Mitt Romney criticized President Barack Obama for depleting the military budget and reducing the U.S. Navy to the fewest ships since 1917. “Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed,” Obama responded, alleging that the function of traditional warships had been rendered obsolete in the era of aircraft carriers and submarines. The U.S. Navy’s current deployment in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Red Sea has proven Obama wrong. The timely surface engagements and swift operations carried out by ships in carrier strike groups — the very destroyers, amphibious ships, and cruisers that Romney vouched for — have played a significant role in combating Houthis attacks and supporting Israel against Hamas and the Iranian terrorist group Hezbollah. The presence and abundance of U.S. sea power may even act as the sole deterrent to a full-scale regional war. US Navy Has Already Deterred Escalation in the Eastern Mediterranean The arrival on June 28 of the Wasp Amphibious Ready Group to the Eastern Mediterranean came in response to escalating tensions and verbal assaults between Israel and Hezbollah. Israel has been engaged in a relatively restrained yet gradually escalating aerial war with the terrorist group on the Lebanese border since Oct. 8. Recent verbal escalation, however, has both sides warning of ground invasions and boasting secret weapons and capabilities. The amphibious group arrived off the coast of Lebanon as a “deterrence,” according to an anonymous U.S. official. Onboard the flagship USS Wasp are F-35 fighter jets, rotary aircraft, and roughly 2,000 marines from the 24th Expeditionary Unit. She is accompanied by the landing ship USS Oak Hill and the transport docking ship USS New York, all able to support landing craft and evacuate civilians. The Wasp squadron is joined in the Eastern Mediterranean by the Dwight D. Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group and the HMS Duncan. The flotilla follows in the wake of the recently departed Gerald Ford Carrier Strike Group that arrived on the scene after Oct. 7 and the Bataan Amphibious Ready Group deployed in the region since January. With the Ford Carrier Group now back in Norfolk, Virginia, the guided missile destroyer USS Carney was awarded an Israel Defense Force (IDF) certificate of appreciation by IDF Major General Amir Baram. While meeting senior officials at the Pentagon, Baram praised the Carney, an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer, for downing dozens of drones and missiles fired from Iranian soil toward Israel on April 14. The bolstered U.S. naval strength in the Eastern Mediterranean follows the release of a Hezbollah drone surveillance video of Haifa, Israel’s third-largest city. The video ignited a string of verbal threats between Israeli officials and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. Home to Israel’s major seaport and naval base, Haifa lies only 25 miles south of the Lebanese border. “No place” in Israel “is safe from our missiles,” Nasrallah warned in a speech celebrating his surveillance footage, “and it won’t be arbitrary. Everything will be deliberately targeted.” Developments In the Middle East Look Ominous The 9-minute video showed residential suburbs, military complexes, Iron Dome batteries, missile silos, radar sites, oil depots, and military and commercial ships moored in Haifa harbor. According to Boaz Shapira of the Alma Research Foundation, “there is no certainty that the video was filmed during a single sortie,” or even that it was current. Considered by most Israeli officials as a mere psychological terror tactic, the surveillance footage nonetheless prompted Israel Foreign Minister Israel Katz to warn of an “all-out war.” Iran, however, cannot afford to see Hezbollah, its most powerful military proxy in the Middle East, defeated by Israel in a ground war. If Israel initiates “a full-scale military attack,” the Iranian delegation to the UN warned, “a war of annihilation will begin. All options, including the full involvement of all resistance fronts, are on the table.” Coordination began at the end of June between senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard officials and three Shia militia groups in Iraq (Hezbollah Brigades in Iraq, Al-Anjaba Movement, and Katayib Sayyid al-Shuhda’a) that expressed willingness to enter Lebanon in support of Hezbollah should the war escalate. The day following the drone footage release, the potential war’s regional scope widened considerably as Nasrallah accused Cyprus, 125 miles off the coast of Lebanon, of providing airstrips to IDF fighter jets. The Hezbollah leader warned that the sovereign European Union nation would not be spared if full-scale war erupted. Greek Foreign Minister George Gerapetritis called Nasrallah’s threat “absolutely unacceptable” and expressed Greece’s commitment to “stand by Cyprus… in all kinds of global threats coming from terrorist organizations.” Cypriot President Nikos Christodoulides asserted that his country is in “no way involved in the war conflicts,” and is, in fact, part of the solution. Cyprus allowed the World Central Kitchen and United Arab Emirates to use the city of Larnaca as the departure port for humanitarian aid to Gaza. The Cyprus humanitarian corridor “is recognized not only by the Arab world but by the international community as a whole,” Christodoulides maintained. Many European countries in recent days have joined the White House and the Kremlin in advising its citizens to leave Lebanon and prepare for evacuation. Swiss Airlines and the German airlines Lufthansa and Eurowings have also canceled or made alterations to flights to Beirut starting June 29. Although Hezbollah certainly presents a more formidable foe to Israel than Hamas in Gaza, the IDF and the Israeli War Cabinet have approved operational plans for an offensive in Lebanon, evident on the ground by troop and supply movements headed north. The IDF equally boasts full preparedness and undisclosed “destructive weapons.” “We of course possess infinitely more powerful capabilities, which I think the enemy [Hezbollah] knows only a little about, and it will meet them when necessary at the right time,” IDF Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Herzl Halevi stated during a June 19 speech to Israeli troops on the northern border. Although widely recognized as the only nuclear state in the Middle East, Israel maintains strategic nuclear ambiguity and Halevi was referencing capabilities solely within the IDF’s conventional arsenal. Even in today’s technologically advanced and nuclear age, the weight of traditional U.S. naval power still sends a clear message to the world. The arrival of the Wasp Amphibious Ready Group points not only to impending escalation in the Middle East but the necessity of a resilient U.S. Navy to deter global conflict. The post US Navy Works to Deter Full-Scale War appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

The Right’s problem is never the Left. It’s always some idiot who labels himself a centrist. This means he’s not brave enough to say he’s right-wing, nor brave enough to admit he’s left-wing. God said that he would vomit the lukewarm. We are still waiting. Macron has just sold France to the far Left. The first round of the French elections was a breath of fresh air in tune with the political landscape taking shape all over Europe: Fed up with woke liberticide, environmentalist robbery, and migratorist suicide, the French voted massively for Marine Le Pen in the first round. (READ MORE: Elections Leave France in Chaos) In the second round, Macron encouraged the Left — all of France in fact — to stop the, as they say, “extreme right”, with electoral trickery and alliances of dubious democratic legitimacy. The results of Macron’s plan are marvelous: The New Popular Front, led by the communist and antisemite Jean-Luc Mélenchon, has won the elections with 182 seats; in second place comes Macron’s Ensemble with 163, and in third place we have Le Pen’s National Rally with 143 seats. In other words: Macron achieved his goal, of the “dangerous” right-wing not winning, but in return, the largest number of seats have been taken by the most uncouth, radical, and old-fashioned French far Left. How many “French” people voted for this? For how long have they been French? I will not ask any more uncomfortable questions. Anyone who wants to understand will understand. Don’t Try and Understand the French Electoral System When I say that electoral tricks of dubious legitimacy have been used, I know what I mean: Although Mélenchon won the most seats, the most voted party was once again Le Pen’s right wing. Conclusion: Don’t try to understand the damned French electoral system. Macron now has a big problem. Whatever he does, he will be a traitor to one or the other, which is something that defines him quite well, no matter what page in his biography you’re looking at. Everything suggests that he will be handing the government to the left and, perhaps, then exiting via the back door so as not to have to witness the sad spectacle of a government program that seems designed in Havana for the nation that was once one of the moral engines of Europe. (READ MORE: French Racquets) Liberty, equality, and fraternity said the cretins of the French Revolution, the origin of most of the evils that afflict us today. Liberty has been outlawed with the triumph of the extreme Left, equality cannot exist as long as immigrant radical Islamists receive the same affection as French mothers with large families in economic difficulties from the Republic, and as for fraternity, I have only one thing to say: Bataclan. Houellebecq was right in Submission. The prophecy is almost fulfilled. From now on, we will have to say: “France, capital, Tehran.” It is not only Macron who is to blame for the fact that France is officially going to become an Islamist stronghold in the heart of Europe. I do not intend to forget the idiots in Brussels, all the Christian Democrats (who are neither democrats nor, much less, Christians) who have spent years proclaiming the need to curb Le Pen’s right wing. Congratulations to all. Yesterday they were congratulating each other on Twitter. Congratulations, guys: you have avoided a conservative government, in exchange you will have a communist, anti-Semitic, totalitarian, and pro-jihadist government. With allies like these, why would the right wing want enemies? (READ MORE: What Europeans and Americans Really Want) All in all, I admit that I hold a grudge against France. I don’t like its history, I don’t like its politics, I don’t like its ideology, and I don’t like its revolutions. Now they have had an opportunity to change the course of things, and one way or another they have wasted it; although it would be fair to say that the elites have prevented the popular vote from changing the course of history by giving way to a conservative government. I would like to say that I am not the least bit surprised by Macron’s umpteenth betrayal. Once again, it’s the same as always: The only thing I like about France, no matter what, are French women. The post French Elite Have Done It Again appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

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