White House chills on ICE, allies rally after all – Latest News
From the best: White House Chills on ICE
Team Trump “learned” from the fallout in Minnesota that there’s “real benefit in looking reasonable on immigration,” cheers The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley A. Strassel. Good strikes: Making border czar Tom Homan level in Minneapolis, ousting Kristi Noem from Homeland Security and rolling out physique cameras on ICE brokers. The White House additionally tapped “well-liked” Sen. Markwayne Mullin to switch Noem, and he addressed Dems’ “remaining concerns” about ICE. “Yet because it might rob them of their ‘issue,’ Democrats, hilariously” griped that “the GOP was giving them exactly what they want” — making “vividly clear” the DHS shutdown “is unrelated to DHS policy.” Dems see they’re now “losing ground” and “scurried” to provide a counteroffer. Lesson for the GOP: “Good policy is good politics.”
From the left: Allies Rally After All
“Much to the delight of the liberal media,” America’s allies have been “getting their revenge” after a 12 months of “Trump pissing off” and “demeaning” them for failing “to pull their own weight,” observes Batya Ungar-Sargon on Substack. But “after weeks of huffily insisting” they wouldn’t help the prez on Iran, our European allies “decided it’s better to be there at the finish line than not have helped at all,” and “issued a joint statement” stating “collective readiness to heed the President’s call” to “ensure safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz.” The liberal press again “got it backwards”: It was Trump’s willingness to “put Europe on blast” that compelled the allies to behave.
War watch: Strait Closure a US Win?
Critics call Iran’s closing of the Strait of Hormuz “a setback for, and a blunder by, the Trump administration,” however Richard Porter argues at Real Clear Politics that it might be more a “feature” in US planning. “Iran’s erstwhile ally China suffers the greatest direct impact” of the transfer, thereby displaying Beijing “that its oil supply chain is protected by and vulnerable to the U.S. military.” Should the United States “seize Iran’s oil facilities on Kharg Island to squeeze what’s left of Iran’s leadership, the squeeze will be felt in Beijing, too.” Europe, in the meantime, will get far much less oil and fuel by way of the Strait than it does from America — and the US request for help in reopening it exposes how “European left-wing governments” can’t keep in energy with out “voters sympathetic to the Palestinians and the Islamic Republic.”
Conservative: Kent Never Should’ve Had That Job
Joe Kent’s resignation final week as US counter terror chief “titillated the digital left,” notes Spiked’s Brendan O’Neill, however the actual query is “why he was there in the first place.” His resignation letter “is a hot mess of witless foreign-policy posturing and infantile Israel-hate,” written by somebody who “knows zilch about global politics.” To Kent, “Trump is merely gullible while the Jewish State is monstrously sinister.” His animus for Israel “has the pungent whiff of antisemitic conspiracism.” The MAGA motion, whose extremist fringe has embraced anti-Zionism, “needs to sort itself out” and reject “vain, self-exonerating hatred” for Israel, “because Israel isn’t the cause of your wars or your depression or your girlfriend troubles or your baldness.”
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Mideast beat: Israel Boosts ‘Free Iran’ Hope
“The Israelis are exerting their will to create the conditions for a revolution that Iranians have tried and failed to incept for more than a quarter century,” reviews The Free Press’ Eli Lake. In concentrating on the regime’s Basij militia, Israel is “removing the forces of repression.” Meanwhile, “the Iran Freedom Congress” works “to create a broad coalition of external and internal Iranian regime opponents.” Reza Pahlavi, “the exiled son of the deposed Shah,” could also be “the most viable candidate to lead a transition” as a result of he’s “seen by millions of Iranians as the alternative to the Islamist ideology imposed by a hated regime.” “Israel is evening the odds for a revolution by putting its air force in the service of Iran’s dissidents.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
