Wednesday, June 25, 2025

Part I

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Will Iran Recover and Resume its Nuclear Weapons Program? The Effectiveness of the Attacks are Unknown, and the Likelihood of Lasting Change is Difficult to Calculate

Understandably, international events have really set the agenda for much of our conversation in recent days. That’s going to continue, because even as there is something like a ceasefire in effect, and for that, we are thankful between Israel and Iran, and even as Israel claims that it has been largely successful in its efforts to make certain that Iran did not reach a workable nuclear weapon stage, it is also true that the United States joined in that effort, trying to eliminate that capacity on the part of Iran to develop a workable nuclear weapon. There are debates right now as to the success of those efforts.

Of course, Iran struck back against Israel, and then in a largely symbolic act, Iran struck back against the United States, but as we saw, it gave warning so the United States could make sure there were no American personnel in the area. And so there appears to be some kind of stability, probably a transient temporary stability. But the big question is, of course, “On the other side of this, was Iran actually stopped? Was that nuclear capacity eliminated? Was it set back? Is it just a matter of time? Will this incentivize Iran to move even more aggressively towards the development of a nuclear weapon?” All these are huge questions, and it’s humbling for us to recognize. A lot of this won’t be known until the passage of some time. 

But it is helpful to know that there is a realism, there’s an awareness on the part, not only of Israeli leaders, but also of American leaders, and honestly, with the support, I think sometimes in shame, the very quiet support of particularly European allies, the reality is that the score is now pretty much known. Iran has been exposed for what it is. It is an extremist Islamic theocracy, which has been a malevolent force in human history in the global scene since 1979. It was determined and remains determined to eliminate Israel from the face of the earth. It sees the United States as the great Satan. It is far weaker today than it was just a matter of weeks ago. It is far weaker today, certainly than it was two years ago. Its proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas have been greatly weakened. The Houthi rebels have been at least constrained to some degree. 

But the reality is that Iran is not going away as a problem, and that raises a huge question, as you have people asking, “Well, what about the possibility of regime change?” And here’s what we need to understand, a basic principle of historical and political realism, and that is that eventually over time, a government looks like the people, and the people look like a government. And evidence of that has been very frustrating to Western powers, to the idealism, for example, of many American leaders.

And the thought has been, for instance, in Vietnam, “If we can just change the leadership, we can change the culture.” It has been repeated over and over again, and it has not proved to be a successful principle. Now, that’s not to say that didn’t mean there wasn’t justified military action. It is just to say there is sometimes unreasonable hope invested in the claim that, “If we just get rid of the Ayatollahs, there will be better that will come in its place.” And that just hasn’t proved to be true over time.

It’s not to say it never happens, it is just to say that realism requires us to look and see that when you have a regime such as the totalitarian theocrats, the Ayatollahs there in Iran, the reality is that Iran sees itself. And there’s full evidence that the people of Iran overwhelmingly see themselves as part of an Islamic republic, and even as there might be some incremental improvement, there’s no absolute assurance, and that’s an understatement, that what would replace or who would replace the Ayatollahs would be friendlier to Western interests and to human rights, for example, as an abstraction than the current regime, and so we press on. And I think in terms of the moral calculation, one of the most important things to recognize is that it was quite legitimate to take action, to seek to prevent Iran from the development of a workable nuclear weapon, that was in itself a justifiable action. Will these specific efforts lead to the goals that were sought over time? We will find out. At the very least, it appears that it’s reasonable to say that Iran’s timetable has been pressed significantly back.

It is certainly true that Iran’s military power has been significantly degraded. It is also true that the extent of its power and threat through its proxies has also been degraded, and at the center of that is incredible effectiveness on the part of the IDF and of Israel itself. It’s a remarkable achievement, and I think it’s one that will be long remembered in history, but, of course, this is an unfolding story.

Part II

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NATO Allies Are Hiding Under the Shield of the U.S. – Are European Nations Serious About Their Own Survival?

And speaking of unfolding stories, the President of the United States is with other NATO leaders at the summit meeting in the Netherlands, and it’s interesting that there’s been advanced publicity, and the story behind this is really interesting. So over the course of time, from the creation of NATO after the second World War to the present, one of the problems is that European nations, most of the member states of NATO have simply not carried through with their promises to start at least down the road to a sustainable effort in self-defense, which is to say: the military spending, the defense spending on the part of most of our NATO partners has never arisen even to the levels that they had pledged.

And you asked, “Well then, how have they survived?” They survived because of the larger defense umbrella provided mostly by the United States of America. And by the way, this means that some of our closest friends, our closest allies as nations have just come up woefully short. Britain is one of them. It’s hard to imagine a nation to which we are more closely allied. Certainly they’re in the European continent, but the reality is the British have not met these goals.

The Germans have not met these goals. You could go down the list. Well, the announcement has come, even as the NATO meeting was convening, that an agreement had been reached that many of the NATO countries, indeed, all of them, represented at the meeting, has stated that they would increase their defense spending to 5% of their national economies, but then, you take a look and all of a sudden, it appears, “Oh, wait just a minute. Wait just a minute. That 5% isn’t real.”

And you find out because in the fine print it says, “No, we’re going to raise our explicit defense spending to an annual rate of 3.5%, and then we’re going to spend another 1.5% in necessary infrastructure changes to allow that to take place.” And so that means presumably the building of industry, and industrial capacity, even roads and transportation capacity. Cargo capacity used to go down the list. So instantly, you have an agreement of 5% that turns out, really to be 3.5%, and the big question is whether they will even meet that goal. And then, people say, “Well, why does NATO now share this consensus?”

And the immediate answer to that has to be the threat of Russia. It’s Vladimir Putin, the invasion of Ukraine. It’s a wake-up call, particularly because for many of those nations that haven’t been even coming close to meeting their commitments and their national spending goals in terms of defense preparedness, the reality is that they’re really close to Ukraine. They are looking at Vladimir Putin as a clear and close threat, and so all of a sudden, there’s a new sobriety. But even then, it’s really interesting that you have so many European leaders saying, “Well, you know, we are not going to break our economies over this.”

“We are not going to act with fiscal recklessness. We are not going, for example, to simply bow to American demands, that we take a greater responsibility for our self-defense. This is all going to have to be part of a larger picture.” And, of course, part of that larger picture is the fact that some of these European economies are already in trouble. 

Then, two other big developments have taken place, and one of them is the development of the welfare state and so many of these European countries. And one of the big questions in terms of a modern economy is whether in a democratic or a constitutional government, you can have two things, and that is a very robust national defense and a functional welfare state, and so it still remains to be answered as to whether or not that can truly happen. There are places where it is claimed that it is simultaneously working, and so you look at a place, a country like Finland in terms of its welfare state, and in terms of its rather significant capacity in self-defense, but Finland’s a very small nation. You’re talking about a very small economy. It’s NATO partners and especially the longer historic partners that are at stake here. 

The other big development is that so many nations in Europe have created their own version of an energy crisis, and part of this is largely because of the motivations of the political left when it comes to claims about climate change and all the rest.

So let’s just take one nation. Let’s just look at Germany. They’re in the heart of Europe. It was political decisions that have largely created this problem in Germany, and so in the name of cutting down on greenhouse gas emissions, and other things, they started shutting down coal capacity, other forms of fossil fuel capacity. And then simultaneously, meeting other demands from the left, they decided they were going to shut down nuclear capacities, so nuclear power plants were going to be phased out, and then they were going to turn to new alternative sources of energy. Most importantly, they were reflecting an increased dependence upon gas, and that gas, speaking here of liquid petroleum and liquefied gas, it was largely coming from, well, you’ve named it, Russia.

And so now, that has been cut off, and that has left Germany in a very precarious position in terms of energy. There are some other sources. There are workarounds that are being arranged, but of course, they’re expensive, and so that just raises all the political consequences there in Germany.

Part III

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Did Trump Break International Law? Legal Scholar Seriously Argues that President Trump Had to Gain Support of UN Before Authorizing Military Attacks

But thinking about the larger issue of international law, there’s something really, really interesting that has come along. And by the way, the great debate is whether or not there is such a thing as international law, but I’ll tell you someone who thinks there is. That’s Oona Hathaway, professor at the Yale Law School and a non-resident fellow of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. And Professor Hathaway is looking at the question as to whether or not the military action, undertaken by the United States, was legal. “Did President Trump act legally?” Now, there’s a subset of that, which is the question is whether he acted constitutionally, and I think very clearly, he did, and I think the vast majority of constitutional scholars understand that. And by the way, it’s not just theoretical, it’s practical.

There is basically no way practically to argue that anyone other than the commander-in-chief, the President of the United States could be authorized to take such an action on a limited basis. As we said, Congress has the right to come back and cut off the money. Congress has the right to legislate and to try to conscribe some kind of military undertaking initiated by a president, but Congress can’t act as a president, and our national defense actually depends upon that. But it is Professor Hathaway’s argument to which I want to turn here for a moment because it’s really, really interesting. Here, you have a New York Times essay with the headline, “The Perils of Unchecked U.S. Power Abroad.” Okay, interesting.

Here is the argument made by Professor Hathaway. She says, “Acting on President Trump’s orders, the U.S. military conducted a strike early Sunday morning against three Iranian nuclear facilities. Few knew of the strikes in advance.” I continue reading, “Mr. Trump did not seek advance approval from Congress or the UN Security Council as required by law.” Okay, very interesting.

This is an argument, I think, most Americans wouldn’t see coming, particularly in the second part. Here, you have a professor at Yale Law School, nonresident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Professor Hathaway comes back to make the argument that President Trump acted wrongly, illegally, extra-constitutionally, because President Trump did not seek the advance approval of the United States Congress, or of the United Nations Security Council. 

Okay. Like I say, I think a lot of Americans would recognize there’s a question about presidential power in terms of its constitutional limits. I think we’ve already addressed that. I think the vast majority of the American people, especially if they are consistent on the matter, understand that a president has to act in this kind of way, or to put it another way, only a president can act in this way, and it is virtually impossible to protect the United States and to offer some advanced constraint on a president that would prevent this kind of military action. That’s why even on the Democratic side, the complaints are really pretty muted. But it’s the second part that is particularly interesting to me here, where Oona Hathaway makes the argument that the president acted illegally because he did not seek advance approval by the United Nations Security Council, as she says, “As required by law.” Her next sentence is this, “The unlawful strikes have thus laid bare the dangerous absence of any effective legal constraints, whether domestic or international, on the decision of the American president to use deadly force anywhere in the world.” She says, “It has become almost quaint to observe that the Constitution gives Congress, not the President, the power to declare war. Yes, the president is commander-in-chief in the military, but he is obligated to seek authorization from Congress before he initiates a war.” Okay, very interesting. By the way, just as a sentence, that sentence is correct. The President is obligated to go to Congress for a declaration of war. But obligated in what sense?

It clearly has not prevented any president since 1945 from taking action, including military action. So you just take one example. In the Kosovo crisis, president Bill Clinton authorized thousands of U.S. military strikes, thousands of them. No congressional declaration of war. The entire war, we call the Vietnam War, was never a declared war, and you could include several presidencies in the complicity in the Vietnam War.

You can look at the First Gulf War, look at the Second Gulf War, look at other military actions. It is very clear the United States has acted routinely. Presidents have acted rather routinely to initiate military actions short of a declaration of war. Is that right or wrong? Well, that’s actually a very interesting debate.

Certainly, in the short term, I think it’s constitutionally necessary. It’s necessary that presidents act to defend the military interests of the United States. That’s actually a part of the presidential oath of office and should be recognized as such. But when you’re looking at something sustained over time, Congress had to appropriate money for a war, Congress didn’t even authorize, say, let’s just take Korea or Vietnam as two examples. So Congress has largely abdicated that responsibility since 1945, let’s just say, and so it’s largely a theoretical argument, and I don’t even think that’s the most interesting part of the claim being made here.

I think the most interesting part is where Professor Hathaway says that the president violated international law. He was obligated to seek advance approval by the Security Council of the United Nations. Okay. That, I think, is a lot more interesting. It raises more interesting questions even than the constitutional question here in the United States.

Professor Hathaway, well into her essay, writes this, “Just as the president is legally bound to seek authorization from Congress before launching a war, so too is he required to seek authorization from the United Nations Security Council. In the wake of World War II, the United States designed and championed a global system, where the use of coercive authority by any state against another was subject to collective checks. The United Nations Charter provides that signatory states must, in the words of the charter, ‘refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.’” Professor Hathaway continues, “This prohibition on the unilateral resort to force is the foundational principle of the post-war legal order.” Interesting.

“Only if the security council votes to authorize a war or if a country is the subject of an armed attack, may a state that has ratified the UN Charter resort to force against another state.” All right, very, very interesting.

Part IV

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The Logic of Much “International Law” Falls Apart – Just Look at How That’s (Not) Working in Russia

So is that an operational principle? Well, it is when the United States wants it to be. It is not when the United States does not want it to be. Does this constrain other actors? Well, it’s really interesting that in this article that was published just yesterday in the New York Times, so this isn’t something that was written 10 years ago, this is yesterday, Professor Hathaway writes, and I quote, “Yes, the requirement of gaining support from the security council is an obstacle, but it is an obstacle to Russia and China as much as to the United States. The requirement to seek and obtain security council authorization before using force moreover, gives the United States extraordinary power. The U.S. holds one of five permanent seats on the security council, and with it as a veto over any decision to authorize the use of force.” So that last part’s just incontrovertibly true.

The United States does and has, from the beginning, had veto power, but is it not ridiculous to claim that the evidence of the binding power of international law is that this requirement binds Russia and China as much as the United States? How can you say that in 2025 with a straight face? In what sense did any of this bind Vladimir Putin from invading Ukraine and prosecuting that war even to the president and beyond? The answer is there was no constraint at all. And by the way, Russia was the inheritor from the Soviet Union of one of those seats and the same veto power, which it uses to its own advantage.

As I say, I find this really interesting. It raises huge issues. Behind this professor’s article is the unquestioned assumption that there is such a thing as international law. Okay. Is there or is there not?

Well, you know, in a Christian perspective, you have to say, well, there is, in the sense, that there is a moral law of the universe that the creators put in place and all powers, all persons know that law is obligatory. But does that come in the form of a codified law that will regulate nations? And the answer is, well, perhaps in one sense, from a Christian perspective, in theory, it should be, but, you know, the Christian theological tradition also reminds us of all kinds of things, subsidiarity, the power of sin, other principles that remind us that when you look at something like international law, it can be no stronger than the nations that make up that international picture. The moral commitment has to be at a level well below the international level. The international agreement, what you might call international law, has to be the product of a tremendous consensus among nations, and that’s exactly how it came about, and that’s exactly why it really doesn’t work.

And so going all the way back to the Christian theological tradition, especially going back to the medieval period, you’ve had figures in the 16th century, Francisco Suárez, who thought about this and thought the international law was a combination of the natural law and the positive law, adopted by nations or international, what we now call international organization. You had Hugo Grotius, who also was really trying to think through these issues, and I think convincingly, there’s the argument that there is such a thing as international law, because first of all, there is the law of God. There’s the law of God revealed in nature, this creation order, there is the natural law that is, we believe obligatory, but it isn’t codified. It certainly isn’t represented in the positive law in such a way that the international law is anything other than, you might say, symbolic in terms of its stature.

Now, that doesn’t mean it’s never operational. The United States cited something very similar in terms of the trials, for example, of the leaders of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. It was called an international tribunal, something like international law based on the natural law, was invoked, but at the same time, it really wasn’t undertaken in a meaningful way by, say the nations of the world. It was undertaken by the victorious nations in World War II. So, I think as Christians, we understand, yes, there is a binding moral law, but operationally, there is no international authority to legislate that law, or to regulate that law, or to coerce obedience to the law, or to even enforce law-breaking when it comes to that law.

And this is one of the big problems with international organizations, such as the United Nations, and it’s why right now, in space, time and history, right now, you have these huge debates and divides in the United States between those on the Left, who tend to be far more internationalists, and those on the Right, who tend to be more nationalists. I think clearly, the nationalist argument is based in far more realism and substance than the international argument. And so I think that really becomes clear when you have a professor like this, making the argument that this international law, even the requirement of the United Nations Charter for preemptive authorization from the UN Security Council for this kind of military action, the fact that the professor comes right out and says that Russia is obliged to it as the United States, well, if Russia is obliged to it, that means nothing at all. There are big issues at stake here, but it is really interesting to see this kind of argument, and I just don’t think this kind of argument has much traction at all. First of all, the American people, I think just reasonably. I don’t think it has much traction politically in terms of, say Congress.

It certainly doesn’t have much traction operationally. It’s not to say it’s a nothing. It is to say it clearly didn’t prevent Russia from invading Ukraine. It clearly doesn’t prevent North Korea from its atrocities. If anything, what you have are the most orderly nations, ordering themselves in such a way that they basically abide by this law.

But at times, and I think this is very evident in the threat of a nuclear Iran, where many of the countries who would say, “You have to do this, you have to do this. It’s wrong not to do this,” they’re secretly pretty happy that Israel and the United States did this. For one thing, it prevents them having to do it. It also prevents them having to answer for it.

Part V

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The Global Struggle is Not Inclusion and Resistance: The Global Conflict Before Our Eyes is a Battle Between Liberty and Autocracy

Before leaving this today, I want to go to an article by Thomas L. Friedman, a well-known columnist, lots of foreign policy expertise at the New York Times, someone I see as well often, more a part of the problem than the solution.

And nonetheless, he writes an article, “The Attacks on Iran Are Part of a Bigger Global Struggle.” That’s certainly true, and I think it’s very interesting to see how he divides the world. We just have a couple of minutes, he divides the world, Russia on one side, the United States and our allies on the other, and he puts Iran and Hamas with Russia, in this case. He says, “The distinction is between the forces of inclusion and the forces of resistance.” He says, “That is a struggle between countries and leaders who see the world and their nations benefiting from more trade, more cooperation against global threats, and more decent, if not democratic governance versus regimes whose leaders thrive on resisting those trends because conflict enables them to keep their people down, their army strong, and their thieving of their resources easy.”He says, what he calls the forces of inclusion, they’ve been growing stronger, but now, you see the forces of resistance really showing themselves. 

So what about this kind of distinction, forces of inclusion versus forces of resistance? Let me just say, I think inclusion can’t be the right word here. And I think it shows you something of the worldview of Thomas L. Friedman, and so many more on the center left, and the left when it comes to American politics and culture. When it comes to inclusion here, that would require some definition as to inclusion in what?

And I think the answer there is, and I’m saying this on the basis of having read Thomas Friedman for years, is the emergence of kind of a new world order, and he laments the falling apart of that new world order, kind of a Kantian era or age of global peace, the forces of resistance or the forces against that. But I guess I just want to make the point that I don’t think the dichotomy here is between the forces of inclusion and the forces of resistance. I think it comes down to the forces of liberty and right, and the forces of anarchy, and terrorism, and mayhem. I think his categories are just too simplistic. As Christians, we recognize that there is no absolutely good regime.

There is no absolutely good person. Sin runs right through the human condition and right through nations, but in the ledger of history, and judged in a Christian worldview, there are nations that more adequately uphold what is right, and just, and true, and those who are absolutely opposed to it. Inclusion and resistance, it’s not just that they’re wrong, it’s that they’re far too superficial to get at the real issue.