President Trump is now seeing Vladimir Putin through clearer eyes. I suspect Melania deserves much of the credit.

As Mr. Trump has recounted, after phone conversations with Russia's longtime ruler, he'd tell the First Lady: "You know, I spoke to Vladimir today, we had a wonderful conversation." And she'd reply: "Oh really? Another city was just hit."

Among the Ukrainian cities Mr. Putin has hit with missiles and drones after such conversations: Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipro, and Odesa. Among Mr. Putin's targets: kindergartens, hospitals, schools, and residential apartment buildings.

Continue to the full article  |  More articles

The Arab Spring was the media's name for a wave of protests – some peaceful, some violent – against various Middle Eastern dictatorships between 2010 and 2012.

Demonstrations against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad began in 2011. With unbridled brutality, he attempted to suppress them.

In what soon became a full-blown civil war, Mr. Assad slaughtered an estimated 600,000 Syrians and displaced more than 13 million.

Participating in these crimes were Hezbollah, Tehran's Lebanon-based proxy, and forces deployed by Vladimir Putin, Russia's longtime ruler.

The fall of the Assad regime last December was an unintended consequence of the war that Hamas, another Tehran proxy, launched against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

Continue to the full article  |  More articles

"You don't make peace with friends. You make it with very unsavory enemies."

That aphorism, attributed to former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, has always struck me as more hopeful than convincing.

Americans didn't make peace with the Nazis. We made peace with those we permitted to hold power in Germany after we decisively defeated the Nazis.

Today, there is no conceivable way that Israel can make peace with Hamas, a military wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, and a Tehran-backed terrorist organization committed to jihad, the annihilation of Israel, and the genocide of Israelis.

Continue to the full article  |  More articles

Interpol is such a cool idea: Cosmopolitan cops chasing criminals around the world.

That's the image that's been projected in movies like "Interpol" (1957), "The Medallion" (2003), "The International" (2009), "Now You See Me," (2013), "Darc" (2018), and "Red Notice" (2021).

The reality, I'm sorry to tell you, is rather different.

The roots of the International Criminal Police Organization, as it's officially known, go back nearly 102 years. It currently has 196 member countries. But it's not an international FBI. It doesn't have agents who carry weapons, investigate crimes, or make arrests. It doesn't enforce international laws.

Continue to the full article  |  More articles

President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth were hopping mad last week over attempts to minimize what they'd achieved through the deployment of B-2 stealth bombers and Massive Ordnance Penetrators against the nuclear weapons facilities of the Islamic Republic of Iran, a nation-state committed to jihad against America and its allies.

In case you missed this skirmish: Someone leaked to a CNN reporter a classified, preliminary, and "low-confidence" assessment from the Defense Intelligence Agency (one of 18 federal intelligence agencies) assessing that Tehran's nuclear weapons program had not been seriously set back.

Continue to the full article  |  More articles