The Lebanese Shi’a Islamist party, Hezbollah, emerged at the intersection of three momentous developments. First, beginning in the 1960s, Shi’a religious scholars began mobilizing their marginalized community with the objective of empowering it on the communal and state levels.
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida drew swift condemnations from establishment Republicans. They are wrong; the governor said what many have been blind and oblivious to, and these hawkish Republican critics have a warped, ill-informed view.
It is warped because DeSantis rightly said that the fight today is not about Kyiv; it’s about Crimea and Donbas, historically disputed territories and, therefore, not of vital interest to the United States.
In a recent op-ed, TNI editor Jacob Heilbrunn fundamentally misrepresented the Ukraine conflict, ignoring Russian president Vladimir Putin’s determination to retain Crimea and willingness to deploy nuclear weapons.
The Ukraine crisis has more or less reinforced the nearly global view that the world is better served with multipolarity and multilateralism.
A weakened Russia is in the best interests of Israel. We have beaten them before and can again. Historic Russian antisemitism continues to reverberate today, while Ukraine’s war for continued independence deeply resonates with our own War for Independence nearly 8 decades ago.
